Greedy reductionism
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Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between what he considers acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism. Whereas reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to, greedy reductionism arises when the thing we are trying to understand is explained away instead of explained, so that we fail to gain any additional understanding of the original target.
For example, we can reduce temperature to average kinetic energy without denying that temperature exists, so this is good reductionism. In contrast, when we consider the question of why clicking on a hyperlink takes us to one website and not another, any answer that says that it all comes down to electrons and that hyperlinks don't really exist anyhow is a greedy attempt to explain away the problem without solving it.
B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism has often been criticized as greedily reductionist, due to a perception that it denied the existence of mental states such as beliefs. Notably, Skinner himself characterized his views as anti-reductionist: in Beyond Freedom and Dignity and other works (e.g. About Behaviorism and chapter 19 of Verbal Behavior [1]), he wrote that while mental and neurological states did exist, behavior could be explained without recourse to either. Thus, from the Skinnerian standpoint, it is mentalism which displays greedy reductionism, as human behavior is explained away by mental processes which occur in an ambiguous "mind" while ignoring the importance of the study of behavior for its own sake. This example is particularly relevant because Dennett himself can be categorized as a type of behaviorist.[citation needed]
In Consciousness Explained, Dennett argued that, without denying that human consciousness exists, we can understand it as coming about from the coordinated activity of many components in the brain that are themselves unconscious. In response, critics accused him of explaining away consciousness because he disputes the existence of certain conceptions of consciousness that he considers overblown and incompatible with what is physically possible. This is likely what motivated Dennett to make the greedy/good distinction in his follow-up book, to freely admit that reductionism can go overboard while pointing out that not all reductionism goes this far.
The opposite extreme from greedy reductionism is called holism, or nonreductive physicalism. Nonreductive physicalists deny that a reductionistic analysis of a complex system like the human mind can work at all. This idea is expressed in some theories that say consciousness is an emergent epiphenomenon that cannot be reduced to physiological properties of neurons. Dennett's response is to call such notions mysterian.
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[edit] 'Nothing Buttery'
C. S. Lewis coined the term 'nothing buttery', which is synonymous with greedy reductionism (though he used it specifically to counter the reductionism of materialism). The term refers to the tendency to say something is 'nothing but' something else (as in, 'The Mona Lisa is nothing but daubs of paint on canvas'), without acknowledging that the whole that emerges may be greater than the sum of the parts.[1]
[edit] Similar Expressions
An informal fallacy, similar in nature to Dennett's "greedy reductionism", called the fallacy of division, states that what is true of the whole is not necessarily true of some or all of its parts. This fallacy is often cited when making distinctions between the nature of parts and the nature of their whole, and could be considered to be a more formal expression of Dennett's notion.
[edit] References
- ^ # ^ Skinner, Burrhus Frederick (1957), Verbal Behavior, Acton, Massachusetts: Copley Publishing Group, ISBN 1-58390-021-7 pp. 432-452
- Dennett, Daniel (1991), Allen Lane, ed., Consciousness Explained, The Penguin Press, ISBN 0-316-18066-1.
- Dennett, Daniel (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-684-82471-X.
[edit] See also
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