Reductionism in the Philosophy of Mind Reduction can be understood in a loose or in a strict sense. In the loose sense, entities (or expressions) of a given type are reduced if they refer to "nothing over and above" other entities...

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...

1. Any doctrine that seeks to explain and reduce a complex proposition to a simpler one. 2. The belief that understanding human behaviour can be reduced to, or interpreted by, the behaviour of lower...

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...