reductionism

reductionism In its most general usage, the term reductionism denotes any intellectual strategy for reducing apparently diverse phenomena to some primary or basic explanatory principle. For example, reductionist forms of materialism as applied to the natural sciences have attempted to explain the distinctive properties and powers of living beings in terms of the concepts and laws of chemistry. Attempts to explain patterns of difference in measured human intelligence, or social differences between men and women, in terms of genetic or physiological differences are commonly criticized by sociologists as examples of misguided biological reductionism. Some forms of Marxism, in which economic relations are supposed wholly to determine social and political life, are also commonly criticized as economic reductionism. Distinctions may usefully be made between logical reduction, in which the aim is to reduce the laws of the more superficial science to the more basic one; semantic reduction, in which the language of one science is defined in terms of the other; and explanatory reduction, in which the aim is to show that the phenomena of one science can be explained as effects of mechanisms identified in another.