Reductionism

Reductionism is the endeavor of understanding any object of inquiry, such as physical objects, situations, phenomena, explanations, theories, concepts, language, and so forth, by specifying the elements that constitute it. Whenever one level or domain or whole is analyzed as nothing more than another, it is said to be reduced to that other. The whole does not impart meaning to its parts, but rather, the parts are the meaning of the whole. The study of anything must be the study of its parts.

Reductionism can be said to trace back to the Middle Ages with the development of nominalism, which was committed to the reduction of collectives to their constituent elements. However, the full strength and significance of the method of reductionism developed along with the development of Newtonian physics, which incorporated the process of understanding the object of inquiry by analyzing its constituent elements. Newtonian physics depicts the universe as composed of discrete particles operating mechanistically and deterministically according to the universal laws of motion, gravity, and so forth.

But while science takes no position concerning the status of the object that it analyzes, the term reductionism implies a philosophical outlook that finds the ultimate meaning of any object to lie not in its inherent qualities as a whole but in the parts that compose it. This position identifies knowledge in general with the findings of science and mathematics and the method of gaining knowledge in general with the procedures of rational analysis used in Newtonian physics. The implicit assumption of this worldview is that physics is the metaphysics of nature. What mathematical physics and physiology find is what, and only what, is truly real and truly knowable, and what we experience is reducible to the procedures and contents of math and science.

This reductionist point of view has implications for the understanding of the scientific method itself, leading to a strong antitheoretical bent. According to this view, scientific investigation does not penetrate nature in a way the senses cannot, but rather, scientific investigation is the rigorous, economical organization of what is given to us in experience. And since, at its extreme, it is held that what we have in experience are not objects “out there” but sensations, the goal of scientific investigation becomes that of discovering relations between sensations. The construction of theoretical entities is useful in science, but these are not getting at some transphenomenal realities. Rather, they are learning devices or models, psychological aids for organizing our sensations.

As theoretical concepts lost their significance, the focus on theoretical entities was replaced by a focus on the structure of empirical concepts and their logical ordering. Science becomes understood as a hypotheticodeductive system, and scientific theory is understood as an axiomatic structure, similar to a logical or geometrical ordering. On this view, a theory is nothing but a logical ordering of the relations between observed phenomena. The question as to why or how theories could have predictive power concerning future experiences is ignored or considered irrelevant. The reductionist framework is not concerned with the dynamics of science, with theory formation and theory growth, or with predictive power, but with the logical formalization of accepted theory, which is, ultimately, the formalization of experienced phenomena and their relations. Within science, the term reductionism is sometimes used to refer to the view that all special sciences, such as biology, psychology, chemistry, and so forth, are reducible ultimately to the fundamental laws of physics, a claim which is also termed the unity of science.

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