Talk:Reductionism

message: ... is not great. Could do with a significant rewrite to describe reductionism more plainly and in terms someone who has not done Phil 101 (and ... er  only Phil 101) could understand. ElectricRay (talk) 15:21, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Article quality 

message: I'm a bit confused about the "emergence disproving reductionism" part. Maybe some summary on the notion would help? I mean, certainly it isn't argued that emergence is where something is more than the sum of its parts. Does anyone really believe that? It would make *much* more sense for someone to argue that if simpler parts inexplicably result in a more advanced whole than is predicted then the simpler parts' values were miscalculated. Of course, this is just my opinion, but certainly there aren't scientists, (supposedly) the fonts of all that is logical and sound, who would believe otherwise? Where are the sources to this claim?
=== Reply ===
Generally, people who speak about emergence do mean that there are systems for which the complete correct knowledge about the parts does not offer complete correct knowledge about the system, and some of these people are scientists, or mathematicians. The analysis of complex systems is to do with this. Complex systems are said (although afaik not yet proven) to be impossible to understand analytically. In other words, one can't work, by maths, from the description of the rules of a complex system, a script on how it will behave. Cellular automata with very simple rules and turing-complete behaviour make a good case.
Eulen 13:43, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reductionism and emergence 

message: Generally, people who speak about emergence do mean that there are systems for which the complete correct knowledge about the parts does not offer complete correct knowledge about the system, and some of these people are scientists, or mathematicians. The analysis of complex systems is to do with this. Complex systems are said (although afaik not yet proven) to be impossible to understand analytically. In other words, one can't work, by maths, from the description of the rules of a complex system, a script on how it will behave. Cellular automata with very simple rules and turing-complete behaviour make a good case.
Eulen 13:43, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reply 

message: Reductionism claims that (natural) phenomena can be reduced to the result of interactions between their elementary building blocks within an all-embracing consistent theory that describe the nature of these interactions. Ultimately, this should lead to a "Theory of everything". A reductionist is satisfied if he can explain a natural phenomenon as the result of a known interaction between different building blocks with their specific characteristics.
Emergentists claim that this is not always possible because there are many phenomena with properties that are completely different from those of their elementary building blocks, and that cannot be deduced from them either. For example, an atom has completely different properties than those of its building blocks: electrons, protons and neutrons. An entirely new theory even had to be designed (Bohr's atomic model, the first major success of quantum mechanics) to be able to interpret the atom as a phenomenon. Emergentists, therefore, claim that there cannot be a comprehensive, consistent theory of nature because new emergent phenomena occur at every level of scale, which in themselves can be explained but which are not the obvious result of the interaction between its elementary building blocks.
A simple example for illustration:
The creation and resolution of a traffic jam on a highway can be easily explained and simulated by a computer program. The interaction between those cars depends on the speed and the minimum distance between the cars themselves. The (weak) emergent phenomenon that occurs here is that of a retrorade longitudinal wave. This phenomenon is a characteristic of the collective, not of the individual cars, and is therfore an emergent phenomenon. However, "hard" reductionists will say that this phenomenon can easily be explained by the collective interactions between the cars. The pattern that emerges from this (the longitudinal wave) is a purely subjective assessment based on our knowledge and namegiving of that pattern. This reasoning can be applied to all so-called "weak" emergent phenomena such as: starling a flight, a school of fish, a water vortex, panic in a crowd, the movement of stars in a spiral system, entropy (in the sense of disorder), the so-called Game of Life of Conway.
However, this hard reductionism fails in the case of "strong" emergence such as in the above-mentioned "Bohr" atom model, the result of a chemical reaction, crystal formation, a mutation in the DNA, artefacts, etc. In those cases, the emergent phenomenon has new and special properties that cannot be deduced from the properties of the individual building blocks.
More and more physicists (f.i. Piers Coleman, Klaas Landsman) regard emergentism and reductionism not as contradictory but as complementary.
Ypan1944 (talk) 15:43, 17 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another reply: are reductionism and emergentism complementary? 

message: Question: What if emergent phenomena modulate the behavior of components at a lower, more reduced level?
Would this view be compatible with a reductionist perspective on emergent phenomena, or would it challenge reductionism?  I'm thinking in terms of biological systems, in case that helps clarify.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.72.192.69 (talk) 16:21, 18 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reductionism and Emergence, Interaction Between Phenomena at Different Levels of Reduction 

message: The first of these are commonly accepted but the last step is controversial and therefore the frontier of reductionism: evolutionary -psychology and -sociology vs. those who claim people have a soul or another quality that separates them from the material world.
This seems to imply that either you subscribe to evolutionary psychology and sociology or you believe in a soul or some other supernatural phenomenon. There are many intelligent materialists who are deeply critical of evolutionary psychology and sociology - the late Stephen Jay Gould (unceremoniously defenestrated in another passage of the article) was one. Spiritual explanations are only one kind of counter to reductionist thought, and not in my view the most obvious or important. Breffni--134.226.1.194 00:17, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  False dichotomy 

message: The religious stance hadn't been mentioned,so it can't be a "redescription". These additions are not anti-reductionist, just a framing of the debate. Plz use Talk....
:Fine. Your edit is suffciently general and concise as to be hard to object to. My only concern is that, on Wikiepdia, one mention of a particular religious view or something that invokes things beyond the physical in a vague manner in philosphy  of science articles almost always leads to an overhwleming assault  from people with eccentric, pseudoscientific theories (often their own), New Age postmodern gobbdledygook which no one can understand, and so on. I will leave it alone and hope that the page doesn't fall apart into nonsense. But beware that there are literally millions of people who come across the philosophy pages and think they vcn now get their chance to disprove reductionism (or what have you) becasue the e.g. L. Ron Hubbard said that there exist "indescribable essences of the mainifest being which invoke the six-dimenisal Kalabi Yau space of unknowable noumenal objects, etc.." --Lacatosias 09:23, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I share your concerns but actually feel having a blanket mention of "beyond visible nature" sentiments may lead to less non-philosophic intrusion rather than more. Hopefully people will see there's at least a general description of thier objections and go merrily on thier way. Besides, though a reductionist myself, I take the religious impulse seriously and believe it should get its due in articles like this. But "its due" should almost always be a short, purely non-sectarian statement. JDG 13:12, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Religion 

message: Methodological reductionism is the idea that explanations of things, such as scientific explanations, ought to be continually reduced to the very simplest entities possible (but no simpler). Occam's Razor forms the basis of this type of reductionism.
As far as I can ascertain this is incorrect. Occam's Razor is a preference for simplicity when dealing with "equivalent" theories. I can not see any direct bearing this has on Methodological Reductionism, which is the view that "An understanding of a complex system is best sought at the level of the structure and behavior of its component parts."  However, Methodological Reductionism redirects to Occam's Razor. I have thus not edited the article yet, pending further discussion. --Nappyrash 10:53, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Methodological reductionism  

message: I have removed the following passage:
:Set-theoretic reductionism is the idea that all of mathematics can be reduced to set theory.  Throughout the history of mathematics, the idea that all  of mathematics can be reduced to a single branch has been very powerful.  However, most of the attempts to reduce mathematics to a single branch have been proven either incomplete or inconsistent.  Most of these proofs were developed by Gottlob Frege.  He then proposed his own form of reductionism, logicism, which in turn was famously disproven by Russell's Paradox.  Many believe that Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proves that reductionism in mathematics is impossible (since all systems cannot be both complete and consistent at the same time), but there is still a great deal of debate on the matter.
There is some truth in the above, but it's so badly muddled that I don't see how to fix it. Point by point:
#The first sentence needs a reference; while it's a plausible name for the idea that math can be reduced to set theory, I've never actually heard it used, other than here.
#Frege was not the one who showed how to reduce the vast majority of mathematics to claims about sets. It's actually the work of many great names -- Cauchy, Dedekind, Cantor, Zermelo, and von Neumann are probably the most important.
#Frege's logicist version of set theory was indeed refuted by Russell's paradox, but it's problematic to identify Frege's logicist set theory with logicism as a whole.
#The Gödel theorems are indeed often seen as refuting logicism (though this is debated), but they certainly don't refute reducing mathematics to set theory (reduction of mathematics to set theory is not per se logicist, because set theory is not purely logical). And the explanation ("since all systems cannot be complete and consistent at the same time") makes no sense.
The ideas might well merit inclusion in the reductionism article, if sourced and explained clearly, but I can find nothing worth saving in the existing text, and I don't have a reference talking about "set-theoretic reductionism" that would enable me to write alternative text. --Trovatore 08:23, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Regarding point 2: I don't think the passage says thet Frege showed how to reduce mathematics to set theory, but rather that he showed that many attempts to do reductions to a single branch are flawed. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 11:03, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, possibly. Did he in fact show that? I don't know of an example. --Trovatore 19:15, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have no idea. -- Meni Rosenfeld (talk) 19:24, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

text: If Meni Rosenfeld is correct about point 2, it seems the first part of point 4 is also a misreading of the original text.
I think that we should add back the material on set theory.  It seems highly relevant to reductionism.  Perhaps we could come up with a more balanced viewpoint, and more sources?  Cazort (talk) 19:32, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

text: Well, it's not enough that it seem relevant intuitively. The question is, do writers on reductionism make this connection? We shouldn't add material to this article on the grounds of "hey, this kind of sounds like the same thing to me". But if you can find the sources (preferably by recognized authors), then have at it. I wouldn't re-use any of the old text, though, for the reasons I explained above. --Trovatore (talk) 21:27, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There are actually a ton of sources out there...which I have come across.  It's a lot of work to add though because it's not something I know all that much about and the things tend to be a bit hard to read.  I put a small amount of text there with one source.  It would be nice to have more sources but...I'm not sure we really need any more material since there probably isn't all that much that could or should be said about it on this page.  I agree with your criticisms of the old text.  As another note, I think there's a slight problem on this page with "such-and-such" reductionism.  I find a lot of people wrote text like this onto the page...when it would be more accurate to talk about "reductionism in" or "reductionism as applied to" or "an interpretation of reductionism" or something of the like.  In searching for several of the categories I found that the scholarly literature doesn't really refer to them that much (for example, "scientific reductionism"...it seems people usually just say reductionism without the qualifier of "scientific").  Cazort (talk) 04:52, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "set-theoretic reductionism" 

message: This article seems very inaccurate and misleading to me.  Some thoughts: is reductionism a "theory"?  Not really in the scientific sense because it cannot be invalidated...rather it seems to be an approach, a principle, a guideline, something of the sort.  Also, the "Criticisms" section seems misnamed...it's not so much a question of whether or not reductionism is "correct"...but rather, the question of its scope--what types of systems are appropriate for reductionist thinking/study, and what types are not.  The controversy/criticism always stems from application of reductionism to a particular system or field of study.  I also find the introductory paragraph discussing unity of science to be pretty problematic.  I recommend scrapping it...unless...does anyone see a way to salvage it?  It seems very POV, more than a bit arbitrary, and I can see people objecting to it on so many counts.  Cazort 20:14, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem with "criticisms" is that people aren't criticizing reductionism itself, they're criticizing the use of it in certain contexts they see as appropriate, or criticizing ontological reductionism.  I think it is hard to deny, too, that there are very real practical limits to reductionism, even if one accepts ontological reductionism.  Saying "proposed" I think would water it down too much.  Cazort (talk) 18:34, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Serious Problems 

message: I deleted the Richard H. Jones source, and all the material associated with it.  I feel that this rather extreme action requires some justification and explanation.  I know this is a subjective judgment, but I got hold of the book and read it and I found it to be extremely lacking in terms of quality of scholarship and content, and not really suitable as a valid source.  If someone wants to dispute this, I'm open to discussion, but I think one would need some sort of verification that that source is indeed accepted as legitimate by others in the field, and honestly I would be very surprised if that were the case.  Cazort (talk) 00:55, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Justifying my changes 

message: The idea of reductionism was introduced by Descartes in Part V of his Discourses (1637). Descartes argued the world was like a machine, its pieces like clockwork mechanisms, and that the machine could be understood by taking its pieces apart, studying them, and then putting them back together to see the larger picture.
Descartes was a full  mechanist, but only because he did not accept the conservation of direction of motions of small things in a machine, including an organic machine. Newton's theory required such conservation for inorganic things at least. When such conservation was accepted for organisms as well as inorganic objects by the middle of the 20th century, no organic mechanism could easily, if at all, be a Cartesian mechanism.
It's not clear that this is actually reductionism at all, and I don't think it is. It's more of an example of a determinist theory. I'm going to add the stuff from my philosophy book real quick. ImperfectlyInformed | {talk - contribs} 05:50, 11 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  History section 

message: this article implies that all the greatest minds and philosophers consider that Reductionism is a wonderful thing. this simply isn't true and it would be nice if somebody could review this and make it less like and ideological advertisement  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.56.5.180 (talk) 22:47, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure I would agree that the article reads this way.  If you had said this a couple years ago, I would have agreed fully--I initially thought the article displayed the type of bias you're talking about.  However, the article now includes extensive sections on the "limits of reductionism", and also much discussion of criticism and alternative perspectives throughout much of the rest of the article, citing many specific examples of scientists and philosophers, especially more modern ones.  Maybe, if you're still seeing a bias, you're simply seeing the legacy of the development of western philosophy and modern science--modern science has been developed within a largely reductionist paradigm for several hundred years now, and it's only recently that people have started to see the limits of this approach.  Personally, I think this has limited science greatly, and I think many scientists are held back from sometimes obvious discoveries because they are so stuck within the reductionist framework.  Perhaps your criticism would be better directed at the academic establishment as a whole, as opposed to this page.  I have personally found that many philosophers are stuck on/in the idea of ontological reductionism, and many scientists stuck on reductionism when it comes to causal explanations of just about anything (especially, nowadays, in biology and ecology).  But that's just a personal beef of mine and has nothing to do with this page.  Cazort (talk) 00:02, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: overtly biased

message: Does this qualify? "In decision theory, a nonlinear utility function for a quantity such as money can create a situation in which all relevant decisions to be made in a given time period must to be considered simultaneously in order to maximize utility, if all relevant decisions act on utility only through this quantity."  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.233.225.36 (talk) 07:22, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sentences 

message: I think having a link to the abstraction page, or some kind of explanation of how reductionism works as an abstraction process could make the article a little more clear. Any opinions on this?
129.12.200.50 (talk) 00:53, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to Abstraction 

message: This could be extremely useful in this article.
Main Entry: Oc·cam's razor
Variant(s): also Ock·ham's razor \ˈä-kəmz-\
Function: noun
Etymology: William of Occam
Date: circa 1837
: a scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Trappy77 (talk • contribs) 08:55, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  An early precurser to reductionism from www.merriam-webster.com 

message: Pertaining to the following;
"As an alternative to set theory, others have argued for category theory as a foundation for certain aspects of mathematics."
This is completely wrong. While it is true that standard ZFC set theory cannot attain some aspects of category theory, category theory is in no way an alternative to set theory. Tarski–Grothendieck set theory can be used as the foundations of category theory. Metamath has a whole spiel about it here;
http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/ax-groth.html
I suggest removing the sentence, and perhaps mentioning TG set theory.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.89.141.190 (talk) 05:25, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category theory (under mathematical reductionism) 

message: I proposed that this article be merged with Reduction (philosophy).  See Here for a discussion of the possible merge.--Foobarnix (talk) 22:17, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed merge with Reduction (philosophy) 

message: Section 1.3 and section 3 have the same title (Ontological reductionism). They should be reduced to one. - Armin B. Wagner (talk) 13:39, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ontological reductionism 

message: The article on Reductionism as well as the article on Reduction (philosophy) state that ontological reductionism is "the belief that reality is composed of a minimum number of kinds of entities or substances", a claim which is "usually metaphysical". A short explanation would be appropriate. - Armin B. Wagner (talk) 13:55, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  metaphysical basis of ontological reductionism 

message: I think fragmentalism and reductionism cover the same ground.  Throughout most of the former article, it's made clear that "fragmentalism" is a pejorative term for reductionism. Since Wikipedia articles are about things, not words, having two separate articles is a form of content forkery.  I could be misunderstanding the issue, though.  If the cognitive psychology meaning is clarified, only a partial merger may be necessary. — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 18:13, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, What's the difference, exactly? — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 15:30, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

text: Fragmentalism is a way of looking at the world and is rooted in the belief that the world is actually composed of parts rather than wholes; it therefore stands in opposition to holism. Reductionism is a shortcut method of understanding things based on a reduction of complex things into simplified models. Reductionism is thus a method of simplifying complex phenomena, while fragmentalism is a belief that all aspects of our world truly are composed of parts rather than wholes. For example, seawater is reduced to various chlorides and sulphates of sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium but in reality it is more than these. For most everyday purposes seawater can be said to be composed of those chemicals, but in reality it is more than just a recipe of certain chemicals mixed together and dissolved in water. It is perhaps more accurately described as a dynamic 'soup' of interacting ions. Any complex solution is like that. To call it a bunch of chlorides and sulphates is not only a false simplification, it is to use a merely static and one-dimensional picture as proxy for a complex and dynamic totality.
Likewise, anatomists contend that the human body consists of skeleton, muscles, organs, blood vessels, nerves, etc. Holistically, this is merely an abbreviated and hugely simplified model that only partly corresponds to a real human body, which is anatomically a much more complex structure than that. A fragmentalist view of the human body would not necessarily contend that the body is composed of muscles, bones, etc but that the apparent view of individual organs and tissues is truly real and that each organ truly is a discrete entity in its own right. In truth, that is an incorrect oversimplification because no organ or tissue in the body exists separately from all others or from the whole body itself. 
The chemical analysis of seawater is a good example of reductionism, but by contrast, a fragmentalist view would hold that seawater really is composed of nothing more than a bunch of sulphates and chlorides and that seawater truly is composed of nothing more than that. I doubt a reductionist would make such a claim because they (should) know that their approach is just a method, and their model is but a simplification of a complex system not to be taken too literally. Likewise, a reductionist approach to anatomy is aware that the body is more than a collection of parts, while a fragmentalist would hold that it truly is composed just of parts. In these senses the two are clearly very different positions.
Reductionism is thus more of a method for simplifying the world into cause and effect mechanisms, while fragmentalism is more of a belief about how the world is actually constructed. You can argue that fragmentalism is a conceptual product of an excessive use of and reliance upon the reductionist method. You can argue that the habitual use of reductionism naturally leads to a fragmentalist belief system. In that respect, the two go hand in hand. Therefore, although the two terms are close and appear to cover the same ground, they are subtly different in that one is merely a shortcut method of describing things, while the other is a viewpoint, a belief that complex things really do consist only of simpler parts. 
The main problems with reductionism arise from its failure to take into account the wider picture of a field of inquiry. It looks at the pieces and fails to reassemble them into a whole. This was the basis of Rachel Carson's critique of the impact pesticides were having in the early 1960s. Pesticides target unwanted parts of nature--weeds, pests, insects--while ignoring the possible impacts those chemicals can have on other parts of nature such as beneficial insects, soil organisms, aquatic systems, human food chains, etc. 
Persistent use of reductionism can then lead to a fragmentalist view, a type of tunnel vision that contends that our world truly is composed of parts that can be regarded as separate entities.
The problem with fragmentalism is that the world is not actually composed of parts at all but that this is just a product of our perception and of the words we use to describe things. Rocks, minerals, seawater, soil and the atmosphere are all in truth complex natural materials that cannot be fully broken down into truly existent parts. In absolute terms, fragmentalism is thus a convenient but a false view of reality. Likewise, a living organism is not truly composed of parts; that is just a way of seeing it and describing it. The tongue or cheek does not exist separate from the mouth or face; in reality, all the parts blend into each other and do not have a separate existence as discrete entities in their own right. In this respect, reductionism is a false method and fragmentalism is a false view of complex things.
In essence, therefore, reductionism is a method of enquiry that reduces complex things into simpler models, while fragmentalism is a belief that the world is actually composed of parts. One is a method and the other is a belief system. I hope that clarifies why I think the two articles should remain separate. The fragmentalism article ideally needs more depth and detail and more citations to illustrate the above points. Apologies fo length. Peter morrell 19:04, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

text: Boy, I really asked for it.  Do you think you can edit the two articles to clarify the distinction? — Æµ§œš¹ [ãːɱ ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɪ̃ə̃nlɪ] 22:34, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I will have a look at how that might be done with citations to avoid accusations of OR. Thanks Peter morrell 05:15, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: "Reductionism" has two definitions; one is the definition you provide for reductionism, the other is the definition you provide for fragmentalism. We can have two separate articles, but both of the articles currently primarily pertain to the first definition and not the second. If we are going to keep the articles separate, the Fragmentalism article will need to incorporate most of the information currently on the Reductionism article and the Reductionism article will need to be stripped to only the second definition information. Neelix (talk) 04:35, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

text: What you have said does not make sense, please clarify? Fragmentalism is about believing the world to consist of parts. Reductionism is about a simplifying method of making shortcuts about complex phenomena. The current reductionism article already covers this. You need to state more clearly what you think should go in each article. Peter morrell 06:09, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge proposal

message: I just found editation 12 November 2007 (User:Cazort) with link to ref.
: Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory strongly embrace a non-reductionist view of science...
Is this NPOV? Source says e.g. "You cannot have organisms whose internal functioning flouts the rules of physics and chemistry.". 
I'm a bit familiar with Engineering cybernetics, Control theory (see Modern control theory and Controllability and observability paragraphs), State space representation and this flavour of cybernetics is IMHO reductionist (not non-reductionist). 
--mj41 (talk) 22:25, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm, the cited source is about as direct as it can get in support of this statement.  Quote: "Systems theory has always taken an anti-reductionist stance, noting that the whole is more than the sum of the parts" and "Downward causation can be defined as a converse of the reductionist principle above".  The quote in your source does not seem to provide any contradiction to the idea that these fields are non-reductionist in approach--merely that they are consistent with (and constrained by) laws of physics and chemistry, most of which are understood through reductionistic means.  I think it's more a question of what features the fields look at.  If you think my wording is overstatement, I would not object to you removing the word "strongly", as I think it is unnecessary.  I may actually do this myself.  Cazort (talk) 23:10, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I just removed the word "strongly".  I still think, however, that there's no contradiction with this source.  There may, however, be multiple viewpoints on this issue.  If you can find other sources describing aspects of cybernetics and systems theory that are reductionist, then I think this would help to make this more NPOV.  The statement that I introduced does only represent one perspective.  Cazort (talk) 23:12, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

text:  Thanks. Source is about 'Downward Causation' - without any link to cybernetics. So maybe only link to systems theory should remain? mj41 (talk) 23:46, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Limits of Reductionism - cybernetics and systems theory 

message: In this edit Anonymous user 173.228.46.246 attached a rewrite tag to the article without any guidance on the Talk page. In this edit Sunrise moved the tag to the top of the page without further comment. IMO, if this tag is to mean something, it needs to be clarified on this Talk page just what the objections are. I have therefore removed this tag. Brews ohare (talk) 16:26, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of Rewrite tag 

message: I'm not sure that a Philosophy of Biology by a single author can be used to justify a general statement about extreme (itself a judgement mental phrase)) and non-extreme versions.  We need something that addresses Philosophy a a whole to justify that type of change to the lede----Snowded TALK 19:43, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: The term extreme is not meant to be judgmental of reductionism, but to indicate a limiting form of reductionism that says a whole system is "nothing but" the sum of its parts, a statement which virtually no-one subscribes to. Of course, examples abound of abstractions that can describe a system on an abstract higher level with great clarity (because the forest is presented not the trees), while the concepts of the higher abstraction are reducible to a lower level of finer detail (the trees) if more detail is required. An extended quote from Godfrey-Smith's textbook in favor of a more relaxed view of reductionism is presented in the following thread. Brews ohare (talk) 23:31, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

text: By the way, the source already present in this article, John Polkinghorne's Reductionism in the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia, also takes exception to the "nothing but" characterization. Brews ohare (talk) 00:11, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extreme form 

message: Below is an extended quotation from Godfrey-Smith's Philosophy of Biology, which can be read first-hand using Amazons's look-inside feature:
:"This kind of work is "reductionist" in a low-key sense of that term: the properties of whole systems are explained in terms of the properties of their parts, and how those parts are put together. Reductionism is sometimes associated with the idea that a whole system is "nothing but" its lower-lever parts, but this "nothing but" talk is usually quite misleading. A living system may be entirely composed out of a collection of parts, but the system will have features that none of the parts have. Rather than showing that the higher level activities do not exist, the point of mechanical explanation is usually showing how the higher-level features arise from the parts."
::— Peter Godfrey-Smith: Philosophy of Biology, Chapter 2: Laws, Mechanisms, and Models, page 16
I have placed this excerpt here for the benefit of Snowded, who suspects the quote in the Intro was taken out of context. Brews ohare (talk) 23:23, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I said two thing (i) I wanted to see the full quote and (ii) I'm not sure we can define the term from a book on the Philosophy of Bilogy, we need something more generic.  The quote in NO WAY WHATSOEVER supports you use of pejorative language.   Also, please do not assume because you have provided what you think is an answer on the talk page it means that you can revert the article.  You are meant to WAIT for agreement.  Lets see if one of the mainline summaries of philosophy as a whole supports this (or some other change) before we make it please. ----Snowded TALK 07:05, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: You have the full quote and three (3) sources supporting it. There is zero support for the "nothing but" formulation. There is no need to wait until somebody shows up with an 'opinion' about this matter. I have no idea at all of what I have said is pejorative. I think you are just annoyed that no source supports your actions here. Brews ohare (talk) 14:03, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: You have an opinion Brews, you need to learn that other people have them as well.   If you bother to check I have said that I don't think you can change the lede to cover the whole of reductionism from one aspect of philosophy.  You are as ever simply searching for sources to back an opinion rather than thinking about the nature of those sources and their position in a field as a whole.  And yet again, rather than seeking agreement on the talk page you are simply imposing your view.   I'm going to look at this again on Friday when I get home,  For the moment take notice your changes are disputed as they stand and I reserver the right to revert them on Friday if I can't find a more appropriate form of words from a better source.   Also I'm not getting back into and edit war over multiple articles with you. So if you can't learn to work on the talk page I'm going to formulate a proposal as to how to handle interactions with you at ANI ----Snowded TALK 16:28, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

text: Snowded: What I have provided is the opinion of multiple reliable sources. If you have sources with different views, bring them forward. You have no right to revert sourced opinion and replace it with unsupported halftruth based upon scuttlebutt, apparently. Brews ohare (talk) 20:36, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

text: Inasmuch as the sources cited mention the "nothing but" viewpoint in order to disclaim it, I'd guess there are sources that use this formulation. Some of them may show up in this Google Book search. Citing such opinion would make the article more useful, but a NPOV would demand the approach discounting this restrictive definition be presented. Maybe it's worth pointing out that restricting the topic to a narrow "nothing but" definition is tantamount to relegating reductionism to the trash bin of archaic concepts. Brews ohare (talk) 15:14, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: You've provided a source Brews and I have (i) questioned it and (ii) said I will check third party sources tomorrow when I am home   You are not the arbitration of what is or is not sourced data I'm afraid.  We've been through this before and you have to gain consensus rather than satisfy yourself ----Snowded TALK 17:43, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Consensus has nothing to do with it. What reliable sources have to say are what goes in the article. If you have additional views that are sourced, put them in with citations. Brews ohare (talk) 23:49, 19 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Your opening sentence illustrates the problem you have working with other editors.  The Issue I raised is (i) your summary of the source, (ii) if that source is valid for the field as a whole.   You cannot simply say that you don't accept the argument and put your preferred version in without the agreement of other editors. It is not a matter of my adding material, but whether I accept the material you have added.  That I will check shortly and then will amend the article or revert your changes.  As it stands the excerpt you have given is a commentary on reductionism in the context of biology, it is not a definition of the field.  You over rely on on line sources if I may make a general comment.   If I revert the changes you will have to start a RFC or edit war.  ----Snowded TALK 06:04, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Snowded: Your thinking is incomplete. There is an evolution involved in the progress of a WP article. It involves an initial formulation by WP editors that is a summary of what sources say that they have discovered. This initial form is made more encompassing and/or deeper by the discovery of additional sources that make the article more comprehensive. This process is underway here. It's continuation does not proceed as you imagine, which if I understand you, is to revert the presentation of sourced material on the basis of the unsourced personal opinion of a WP editor who thinks the selected sources are inadequate, but does not support that opinion with other sources, but based solely upon some abstract argument that the selected sources are insufficiently general, and that therefore their content should be suppressed entirely until better credentialed sources can be found. A middle ground might be to preface the presented material with some qualifier such as, in this instance: "According to philosophers concerned with reductionism in biology the following opinions are offered..." That preamble to this work would be consistent with the evolution of the artcle, unlike the effects of reversion of this material entirely in favor of an unsourced view that actually is explicitly contradicted by the sources available. However, in fact, the sources available that present the views you dispute are not parochial and limited to philosophers of biology. Brews ohare (talk) 05:50, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extended quote from Godfrey-Smith 

message: I've reordered subsections, put headers of same construction at the same level. However this article is a mess. Brews ohare (talk) 18:57, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article is a hodgepodge 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title: Assessment comment

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The sentence:
 [...] that form of reductionism concerning a program of replacing the facts or entities entering statements claimed to be true in one type of discourse with other facts or entities from another type, [...] 
* is missing a verb. This impairs its comprehensibility. ("concerning" is not a verb without the word "is"; everything after and including "of replacing" has the syntactical function of an object)
* makes syntactically correct use of the word "concerning", which makes it ambiguous, if the writer intended to write "[...] reductionism is concerning [...]" or if the writer suddenly stopped in the writing of a longer sentence.
* may use "program" in a false or exotic sense of the word.
* implies, that facts can enter statements. Which, in (missing) context, is at least wrong, if it is not outright false.
To me this sentence seams as if the writer had insufficient knowledge of english.
This implies, that this article may, in part or in full, be a bad translation from another language.
Strikefinger (talk) 21:48, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language Barriers? / Is the article a translation? 

message: — Assignment last updated by Sunsh1n3d011 (talk) 07:03, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Introduction to Policy Analysis - Summer Session22

message: I've removed a good chunk of the content of this page as it was both poorly cited and not actually about the subject of the article. I still think we should have a criticism section that discusses ideas like emergence, and why some people who study complex systems, ecology, etc. oppose "reductionist" views but it shouldn't bleed into the descriptions of the different kinds of reductionism! Since there was so much content on emergence and holism, I erred on the side of removing content not supported by high-quality secondary sources, if anyone wants to source it better and add it into the criticism section I think that's fine but we don't need in-depth explanations - there's plenty of pages on those topics that can and should be linked to rather than re-hashing that material here.  - car chasm (talk) 16:19, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed a lot of off topic content and consolidated the criticism section