the.com/reductionism
Explaining the symphony by cataloguing the vibrating air molecules.
means The approach of explaining a complex system by breaking it down into its simplest parts and studying those.
from Built from 'reduce' — Latin reducere, 'to lead back' — plus the '-ism' that turns a method into a doctrine. The word itself emerged in philosophical and scientific writing as thinkers needed a label for the move of 'leading back' wholes to their component parts; it names the very act it describes, which is a tidy bit of self-reference for a word about taking things apart.
- core claim
- wholes are just their parts, fully explained
- opposite
- holism: the whole exceeds the sum
- risk
- true in physics, suspicious in psychology
- famous jab
- more is different, per physicist Philip Anderson