Antireductionism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
There are very few or no other articles that link to this one.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. After links have been created, remove this message.
This article has been tagged since June 2006.

[edit] Antireductionism

The opposite of reductionism. [1] Such objections to reductionism often arise in academic fields such as history, sociology, psychology, medicine, biology and ecology as objections to attempts to explain complex phenomena through being reduced to simplistic models that seem ill-fitting or which do not deliver much insight about the matter in hand. [2] More generally, the objection to reductionism involves the view that reductionism might even be per se a flawed approach. Clearly then, there is a spectrum of positions on this issue even within the above disciplines. Generally speaking reductionism has only had limited success in sociology, history and ecology and there is some scepticism in those fields that overtly mathematical and quantitative approaches can yield much useful sense or insight. It would appear that descriptive approaches are preferred.

An example in psychology is the "ontology of events to provide an anti-reductionist answer to the mind/matter debate [and]...the impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between...the mental and the physical." [3]

As Rosenberg and Kaplan point out, "physicalism and antireductionism are the ruling orthodoxy in the philosophy of biology...[yet] both reductionists and antireductionists accept that given our cognitive interests and limitations, non-molecular explanations may not be improved, corrected or grounded in molecular ones." [4]

This is "one of the central problems in the philosophy of psychology...an updated version of the old mind-body problem: how levels of theories in the behavioral and brain sciences relate to one another. Many contemporary philosophers of mind believe that cognitive-psychological theories are not reducible to neurological theories...most nonreductive physicalists prefer the idea of a one-way dependence of the mental on the physical." [5]

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../a/n/t/Antireductionism.html"