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Topic: Greedy reductionism

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Reductionism

Scientific reductionism

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	Scientific reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Daniel Dennett defends this basic kind of reductionism, which he says is really little more than materialism, by making a distinction between this and what he calls "Greedy reductionism": the idea that every explanation in every field of science should be reduced all the way down to particle physics or string theory.
		Greedy reductionism, he says, deserves some of the criticism that has been heaped on reductionism in general because the lowest-level explanation of a phenomenon, even if it exists, is not always the best way to understand or explain it.
		Richard Dawkins describes the alternative as "hierarchical" reductionism: organisms can be described in terms of DNA, DNA in terms of atoms, atoms in terms of sub-atomic particles; but there is no need to deal with details of sub-atomic particles to explain animal behavior if one can make adequate explanations and predictions at a higher level.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Scientific_reductionism (858 words)

	Greedy reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism.
		Whereas reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to, greedy reductionism comes 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.
		The opposite extreme from greedy reductionism is throwing up your hands and denying that a reductionistic analysis of a complex system can work at all.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Greedy_reductionism (415 words)

	Reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Methodological reductionism is the idea that explanations of things, such as scientific explanations, ought to be continually reduced to the very simplest entities possible.
		Theoretical reductionism is the idea that older theories or explanations are not generally replaced outright by new ones, but that new theories are refinements or reductions of the old theory in greater detail.
		The term "greedy reductionism" was coined by Daniel Dennett to condemn those forms of reductionism that try to explain too much with too little.
	www.encyclopedia-online.info /Reductionist (309 words)

	Reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Ontological reductionism is the idea that everything that exists is made from a small number of basic substances that behave in regular ways (compare to monism).
		Methodological reductionism is the idea that explanations of things, such as scientific explanations, ought to be continually reduced to the very simplest entities possible (but no simpler).
		Analytical reductionism as used in "Is Reductionism A Good Approach In Science?" "is the underlying a priori of ontological reductionism".
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Reductionism (583 words)

	Greedy reductionism
		For example, to make sense of the behavior of a computer you can start with a software program like Internet Explorer and try to explain its functions in terms of the algorithms of the many software modules that were combined and packaged as a single application program.
		Greedy reductionism is a good starting point for trying to explaining macroscopic systems.
		It would be greedy reductionism to try to explain the behavior of your web browser only in terms of the movement of electrons.
	www.ebroadcast.com.au /lookup/encyclopedia/gr/Greedy_reductionism.html (407 words)

	Scientific reductionism - Encyclopedia, History, Geography and Biography
		Some believe that the laws of physics may be randomlydetermined and explain the fact that we observe certain physical laws by postulating that only a small subset of laws allow for conscious observers.
		Daniel Dennett defends this basic kind of reductionism, which he saysis really little more than materialism, by making a distinctionbetween this and what he calls "Greedy reductionism": the idea that everyexplanation in every field of science should be reduced all the way downto particle physics or string theory.
		Some physicists argue that large structures undergo collective behaviors which are not most usefully described in terms of the behavior of their constituents (see for example emergence) and therefore there is no reason to label the lower-level behaviors as more fundamental.
	www.arikah.net /encyclopedia/Scientific_reductionism (835 words)

	Behavior and Philosophy: Methodological individualism and vertical integration in the social sciences (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Daniel Dennett defines good reductionism as "the commitment to non-question-begging science," and greedy reductionism as that which skips over several layers of (higher level) complexity in the rush to fasten everything secure and neatly to a solid foundation (1995, p.
		The conflation of greedy reductionism with the kind of "cranebuilt" reductionism that has elevated the physical and life sciences haunts sociology, and if not exorcised could lead to its demise as intellectually respectable discipline (Crippen, 1994; Ellis,1996; Neilsen, 1994; van den Berghe, 1990; Walsh, 1995).
		The term "reductionism" is used disparagingly by social scientists to mean that an inappropriate unit of analysis has been used to explore, describe, or explain what they claim to be a "social fact." In some instances they may be right, but in others they are demonstrably wrong.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_qa3814/is_199710/ai_n8773720 (1294 words)

	Encyclopedia: Scientific reductionism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Superstition is a set of behaviors that may be faith based, or related to magical thinking, whereby the practitioner believes that the future, or the outcome of certain events, can be influenced by certain of his or her behaviors.
		In philosophy, the anthropic principle in its most basic form states that any valid theory of the universe must be consistent with our existence as carbon-based human beings at this particular time and place in the universe.
		Categories: Reductionism Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is a prominent American philosopher.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Scientific-reductionism (1668 words)

	REDUCTIONISM (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Reductionism in philosophy describes a number of related, contentious theories that hold, very roughly, that the nature of complex things can always be reduced to simpler or more fundamental things.
		Analytical reductionism as used in linkthe underlying a priori of ontological reductionism".
		It is licensed under the GNU free documentation license.
	www.yotor.org /wiki/en/re/Reductionism.htm (288 words)

	Re: Social Science Fears Evolutionary Psychology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Bad reductionism-also called "greedy reductionism" or "destructive reductionism"-consists of trying to explain a phenomenon in terms of its smallest or simplest constituents.
		Greedy reductionism is not a straw man. I know several scientists who believe (or at least say to granting agencies) that we will make breakthroughs in education, conflict resolution, and other social concerns by studying the biophysics of neural membranes or the molecular structure of the synapse.
		But greedy reductionism is far from the majority view, and it is easy to show why it is wrong.
	www.talkaboutreligion.com /group/alt.religion/messages/187356.html (2894 words)

	THOUGHTS AS TOOLS: THE MEME IN DANIEL DENNETT'S WORK
		Greedy reductionism, on the other hand, is when explaining is replaced by explaining away, "when overzealousness leads to falsification of the phenomena" and a denial of "the existence of real levels, real complexities, real phenomena" [7].
		Reductionism cannot, however, be such an insult, for while neo-Darwinism is definitely opposed to Lamarckism, vitalism and essentialism, it is by no means so obviously opposed to "reductionism".
		It is not necessary, however, to confound memetics with socio-biology, to claim that it is greedy reductionism.
	pespmc1.vub.ac.be /Conf/MemePap/Mason.html (3099 words)

	Encyclopedia: Greedy reductionism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Temperature is the physical property of a system which underlies the common notions of hot and cold; the material with the higher temperature is said to be hotter.
		Cover of Consciousness Explained Consciousness Explained (published 1991) is a book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which attempts to explain how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.
		The unconscious mind (or subconscious) is the aspect (or puported aspect) of the mind of which we are not directly conscious or aware.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Greedy-reductionism (1148 words)

	Reductionism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		When reductionism is seen in this way, non- reductionism is then readily...
		Analytical reductionism as used in "is the underlying a priori of ontological reductionism".
		Reductionism in Drama and the Theatre: The Case of Samuel Beckett (Scripta Humanistica)
	hallencyclopedia.com /Reductionism (520 words)

	Greedy reductionism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea Daniel Dennett used the term greedy reductionism tocondemn those forms of reductionism that try to explain too much with toolittle.
		It would be greedy reductionism to try to explain the behavior of your web browser only in terms of themovement of electrons.
		The opposite extreme from greedy reductionism is throwing up your hands and denying that a reductionistic analysis of acomplex system can work at all.
	www.therfcc.org /greedy-reductionism-5695.html (371 words)

	Mechanistic paradigm - Simple English Wikipedia
		Believers may reject ideas like psychoneuroimmunology, Gaia philosophy or Fecund universes for no scientific reason, simply because these theories assume "higher level phenomena" sometimes drive lower levels.
		Greedy Reductionism may be more likely among believers in mechanistic ideas.
		For instance, they may want to always see things as made of smaller, even invisible, parts that no one can see or prove is real - like in string theory.
	simple.wikipedia.org /wiki/Mechanistic_paradigm (739 words)

	biology - Bad science
		Many scientific efforts are oriented around reductionism, the attempt to explain complex phenomena in terms of the interacting components of the system.
		Since good science strives to provide the simplest possible explanations of phenomena (Occam's razor), greedy reductionism is a common feature of bad science.
		Greedy reductionism is a derogatory label applied to failed efforts in reductionism where it is incorrectly claimed that a simple set of processes can account for or explain some other complex process or set of phenomena.
	www.biologydaily.com /biology/Bad_science (785 words)

	Scientific reductionism - InfoSearchPoint.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Another attack against this form of reductionism, which is popular among solid-state physicists, argues that it is incorrect to regard the laws which govern the components of structures to be more fundamental than the laws which govern the structures.
		Similarly metals under go collective behavior and interactions that are not reducible to the behavior of an individual atom within that metal, and it has been argued that the laws which describe this collective behavior are no less fundamental than the laws that describe the atoms themselves.
		Yet another attack against the idea of reductionism comes from supporters of the anthropic principle.
	www.infosearchpoint.com /display/Scientific_reductionism (816 words)

	Scientific reductionism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Daniel Dennett defends this basic kind of reductionism, which hesays is really little more than materialism, by making a distinction betweenthis and what he calls " Greedy reductionism ": the idea thatevery explanation in every field of science should be reduced all the way down to particle physics or string theory.
		Some physicists argue that largestructures undergo collective behaviors which are not most usefully described in terms of the behavior of their constituents (seefor example emergence) and therefore there is no reason to label the lower-levelbehaviors as more fundamental.
		Dennett suggests that critics of reductionism may be searching for a way of salvagingsome sense of a higher purpose to life, in the form of some kind of non-material / supernatural intervention.
	www.therfcc.org /scientific-reductionism-5683.html (698 words)

	PS - reductionism - UCSB Dept of Geograpy Discussion Board (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Good reductionism is "simply the commitment to non-question-begging science without any cheating by embracing mysteries or miracles at the outset." He contrasts this with greedy reductionism, where scientists try to skip levels of analysis and miss important phenomena or fail to properly explain the phenomena they were originally trying to explain.
		An example of good reductionism: Trying to explain human intelligence as being underwritten by a collection of information processing mechanisms, which in turn can be understood as being instantiated in neural tissue, which can be understood as being composed of neurons and others cells, etc. etc.
		One reason that you may be confused by the term reductionism is that it is often used as a vacuous pejorative.
	bbs.geog.ucsb.edu /ubb/Forum29/HTML/000029.html (350 words)

	Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Daniel Dennett) - review
		Dennett argues that there is no place at all for skyhooks and that the only bad reductionism is a "greedy" reductionism that tries to do without cranes.
		On a similar note, Dennett rings a wrong note when he claims that only "greedy" reductionism (trying to do without cranes) is bad, and that attacks on reductionism are either vain attempts to find skyhooks or aimed at unrealistic portrayals of reductionism.
		The most widespread forms of reductionism are those that try to restrict the kinds of cranes used or that place excessive stress on particular cranes (typically privileging genetics above ecology and embryology, or physics above everything else).
	dannyreviews.com /h/Darwins_Dangerous_Idea.html (1963 words)

	Talk:Greedy reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Dennett is among those who have the intuition that it is possible to produce consciousness from a collection of coordinated unconcious processes.
		I share Dennett's intuition, but I think it is fair to ask if Dennett is slipping into greedy reductionism.
		The only way to know is to construct a detailed account of how consciousness is generated.
	www.wikipedia.org /wiki/Talk:Greedy_reductionism (287 words)

	Reductionism - Encyclopedia, History, Geography and Biography (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		For example: when you throw Stephen Gould out of a window, his fall can be explained by classical mechanics.
		This page was last modified 04:18, 5 December 2005.
		This encyclopedia, history, geography and biography article about Reductionism contains research on
	www.arikah.com /encyclopedia/Reductionist (560 words)

	Article 5
		In the same way that reductionism is incompatible with human concepts, postmodern scientists such as Birch argue that it is also inadequate for the investigation of unconscious organisms, and instead advocate a wholistic approach which embraces the complex inter-relations between organisms and their environments through the recognition of bidirectional influences.
		Its reductionism is balanced by wholism, which respects the mystery of life as an overall process.
		In comparison, Darwinian explanation, without a wholistic view, resembles “greedy reductionism”—although the idea of an awe-inspiring cosmic force is embedded within it, this idea is obscured so well by evolution’s meaninglessness that maintenance of belief in the value of human concepts is difficult.
	users.bigpond.net.au /marshan/article5.htm (4177 words)

	Reductionism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Date "reductionism" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1980.
		"Reductionism" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 100.00% of the time.
		"Reductionism" is used about 72 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English.
	www.websters-online-dictionary.org /re/reductionism.html (723 words)

	Reductionism: Philosophy Forums (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Hence, ontological reductionism is equivalent to some kind of monism, denying the existence of unseen life forces and such things, claiming that organisms are no more (nor less) than complex functioning machines.
		Despite its successes, methodological reductionism has been highly controversial, for it denies the claims of those (especially Marxists) who argue that the world is ordered hierarchically, and that entities at upper levels can never be analysed entirely in terms of entities at lower levels.
		Especially contentious has been so-called 'biological reductionism', generally associated with the socio-biological movement, where human nature is supposedly fully understandable in terms of genetics.
	forums.philosophyforums.com /comments.php?id=514&page=last (1927 words)

	Greedy reductionism - (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Another example of greedy reductionism is Skinner's behaviorism, which not only reduced all mental attributes, such as beliefs and feelings, to behavior, but went on to deny that anything mental exists, thus failing to answer the questions it was supposed to.
		In response, critics accused him of explaining away consciousness because he disputed the existence of certain conceptions of consciousness that he considered 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 admit that reductionism can go overboard but point out that not all reductionism goes to this extreme.
	www.grohol.com /psypsych/Greedy_reductionism (464 words)

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