What exactly is reductionism?

Question

What exactly is reductionism?

Answer 1

Reductionism is the belief that true knowledge is an objective reduction of reality to its basic forms and intrinsic qualities of existence.

And that conscious perceptions are not.

For example a reductionist will claim,

love is the a biochemical process in the brains anatomy, having said this based on empirical evidence all other interpretations of love that others might consider as being of relevance a reductionist would label a subjective perception and invalid.

Answer 2

Redutionism is effectively taking things down to there simpilest form ignoring all the complex matter

for example saying a human is an animal which learnt to walk on to feet. thats reductionist casue it leaves out all the complex things like the mind and stuff

Answer 3

Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.[1] This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.

Reductionism is strongly related to a certain perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of other, more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena. Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it.

Reductionism does not preclude emergent phenomenon but it does imply the ability to understand the emergence in terms of the phenomenon from which it emerges.

the duck explains it lol here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionis...