Antireductionism

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Although "breaking complex phenomena into parts, is a key method in science,"^[1] there are those complex phenomena (e.g. in psychology, sociology, ecology) where some resistance to or rebellion against this approach arises, primarily due to the perceived shortcomings of reductionism. When such situations arise, people quite naturally search for ideas that supply "an effective antidote against reductionism, scientism, and psychiatric hubris.'"^[2] This in essence forms the philosophical basis for antireductionism. Such rebellions against reductionism also implicitly carry some critique of the scientific method itself, which engenders suspicion among scientists that antireductionism must inherently be flawed.

Antireductionism, then, is the opposite of reductionism.^[3] Such objections to reductionism often arise in academic fields such as history, economics, anthropology, medicine, and biology as disattisfaction with attempts to explain complex phenomena through being reduced to simplistic, ill-fitting models, which do not provide much insight about the matter in hand. ^[4] Some objections propose that reductionism might even be more generally a flawed approach. Clearly then, there is a spectrum of positions on this issue even within the above disciplines. Generally speaking, reductionism has only enjoyed 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; descriptive approaches appear to be 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."^[5]

As Alex 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."^[6]

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."^[7]