The main claim of reductionism is that the goal of science in the long run is to discover reductive explanations of macro phenomena. Reduction is a relation between scientific theories about some natural phenomenon. The macro-level theory describes the...

Harvard biologist, and two-time Pulitzer-Prize winner, Edward O. Wilson, in his 1998 book Consilience, stated that "the cutting edge of science is reductionism, the breaking apart of nature into its natural constituents." The journal Nature, in 1997,...

. Also called reductivism. Tendency to reduce certain notions, whether everyday ones, like physical object, or theoretical ones in science, like electron, to allegedly simpler or more basic notions, or more empirically accessible ones, e.g. one might...

A belief held by some psychologists and others that it is possible to explain a complex phenomenon by breaking it down into smaller parts and explaining the individual constituents. Behaviourist psychology is said to be reductionist because it claims...

Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but...

An examination of early Buddhist reductionism suggests that reductionism entails a number of metaphysical commitments, such as an extremely nominalistic semantics, a theory of truth that distinguishes ultimate and conventional truths, and an ontological commitment to the ineffable pure particular as ultimately real. Derek...

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Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95. With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—­are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into...

Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris. Alfred A. Knopf, 96 pages, $16.95. With the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene, in which he argued that genes—not individuals—­are the key units of natural selection, Richard Dawkins made his grand entrance into the...