Complexity, Reductionism, and Holism in Science and Philosophy of Science
نویسنده
چکیده
There are concepts that belong to the basic terminology of science but which are not used in everyday scientific work – such as the concepts of natural law and causality. Such concepts touch on the epistemological foundations of science, and thus transcend individual disciplines and presuppose a particular interest, the interest in foundational questions of science, and presumably also special skills and competence. Not everything that belongs to these foundations is self-evident and not everything that is said about them in philosophy of science is universally accepted – which in turn lies in the fact that we are dealing with different theoretical approaches. Theory meets theory, and this does not always go without conflict. In the following, as an introduction to considerations of a theoretical, methodological and epistemological nature, which especially deal with aspects of complex structures, I offer some brief explications of a conceptual nature oriented towards the concepts of complexity, reduction and holism.
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