Baliseering as Reductionism Project: Vandana Shiva’s Ecofeminist Approach

The genome project alibi: towards a genetic reductionism?

Reductionism and its heuristics: Making methodological reductionism honest

Methodological reductionists practice ‘wannabe reductionism’. They claim that one should pursue reductionism, but never propose how. I integrate two strains in prior work to do so. Three kinds of activities are pursued as “reductionist”. “Successional reduction” and inter-level mechanistic explanation are legitimate and powerful strategies. Eliminativism is generally ill-conceived. Specific pro...

Reductionism and Biological Complexity

The biologist's progblem is the problem of complexity. According to the conventional wisdom, the way to study complex systems is by breaking them down into their parts. In Richard Dawkins's words, "the biologist tries to explain the workings, and coming into existence, of complex things in terms of simpler things. He can regard his task as done when he has arrived at entities so simple that the...

Reductionism and antireductionism.

Reductionism is the idea that all of the complex and apparently disparate things we observe in the world can be explained in terms of universal principles governing their common ultimate constituents: that physics is the theory of everything. Antireductionism comes in two varieties: epistemological and ontological. Epistemological antireductionism holds that, given our finite mental capacities,...

Reductionism isn't Functional

holism versus reductionism, process algebra, object orientated programming, philosophy of biology One of the great current debates in biology concerns whether the observed behaviour of a system can be accounted for in terms of the behaviours of its subcomponents. The problem is often presented as a question of ‘holism versus reductionism’; whether ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts...