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Topic: Reductionist

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	Buddhist reductionism
		To be a reductionist about things of kind K is, on this view, to hold that while it is not wholly false to claim that there are Ks, the existence of Ks just consists in the existence of certain other sorts of things, things that can be described without asserting or presupposing that Ks exist.
		And yet all Reductionists, we are told, deny the Non-Reductionist thesis that a person is a separately existing entity, that is, an entity whose existence is distinct from that of a brain and body and a series of interrelated events.
		Reductionists must be metaphysical realists, and as metaphysical realists must seek to purge all elements of mental construction from their ultimate ontology.
	ccbs.ntu.edu.tw /FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/siderit.htm (8507 words)

	Reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The first of these are commonly accepted but the last step is controversial and therefore the frontier of reductionism: evolutionary -psychology and -sociology vs. those who claim people have a soul or another quality that separates them from the material world.
		Reductionists believe that the behavioral-sciences should become a genuine scientific discipline by being based on genetic biology.
		The denial of reductionist ideas is holism; the idea that things can have properties as a whole that are not explainable from the properties of their parts.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Reductionism (524 words)

	Scientific reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		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.
		Both Dennett and Steven Pinker argue that too many people who are opposed to science use the words "reductionism" and "reductionist" less to make coherent claims about science than to convey a general distaste for the endeavor.
		Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as "reductionist" or "determinist." The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Scientific_reductionism (814 words)

	Holistic Medicine or Orthodox Medicine and Reductionism?
		Firstly, reductionist orthodox medicine is intrinsically interventionist, that is, the medical practitioner prefers to actively intervene in the patient's illness in an attempt to be seen as having fixed the problem.
		Reductionists would probably assert that natural remedies could not possibly have helped my asthma, it must have been due to the placebo effect (8), or perhaps I never had asthma in the first place (8).
		This restrictive reductionist approach is slowly giving way to the increasing application of systems theory which acknowledges qualities of whole systems, such as robustness (146), which may not be apparent from examining isolated system components (87, 144, 145, 146).
	www.holistichealthtopics.com /HMG/holistic.html (13006 words)

	DNA and Reductionist Science
		In addition to their theoretical beauty, reductionist understandings are of practical value, leading to the creation of pharmaceuticals and improved foodstuffs, doubling life expectancies and making us healthier.
		Criticism of modern science as "reductionist" often carries with it a belief in the victimization by science of women, the underprivileged, and ecosystems.
		We live in a complex world, and however reductionist a theory may appear to be, it must generate and explain complexity and diversity to gain acceptance.
	www.cato.org /dailys/04-03-03.html (976 words)

	Biodiversity trapped in cage by reductionist science : Thunderbay IMC
		Reductionist science is usually funded by industry in the process of evaluating an ecosystem for biodiversity (all plants, animals, fungi, protista, bacteria) and abiotic factors (water moisture, air content, soil chemistry, climate, localized weather, etc.).
		The sampling method used by reductionist science involves a squared plot for landscape/forestry, and an individual species removed from habitat and locked in usually square cage..
		Bifurcation points are qualitative changes in a species that are not measured by reductionist science quantitative sampling that assumes no variability among the sampled species.
	thunderbay.indymedia.org /print.php?id=10819 (726 words)

	Chiropractic Holism: Theory - An Incomplete Explanation (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		In principle, it means that reductionist inquiry has, possibly, reached a limit in verifying present theory or that, possibly, the theory (subluxation complex) may need to be revised.
		Further studies in support of reductionist method, but not that of the subluxation theory, is found in the recognition that reductionist limitation exists in the ability to anatomically dissect the neurological pathways (8.2.3a)...further supports an argument that questions the single level lesion (the subluxation) and somato-visceral responses.
		The problem of reductionist inquiry is further complicated by the entrance of the cognitive sciences as a contemporary explanation of functional elements of the cerebral cortex and topobiological characteristics of the brain; that immunoregulatory effects may be linked to right cortical hemispheric activity or that testosterone is postulated in effecting hemispherical development (8.2.4a).
	www.chiro.org /ChiroZine/target/holism1/seu8_2.htm (860 words)

	7. Reductionist science as epistemological violence
		Reductionist science is also at the root of the growing ecological crisis, because it entails a transformation of nature such that the processes, regularities and regenerative capacity of nature are destroyed.
		The reductionist worldview, the industrial revolution and the capitalist economy were the philosophical, technological and economic components of the same process.
		Reductionist science was concerned merely with the existence of pests, not with the ecology of pests.
	www.unu.edu /unupress/unupbooks/uu05se/uu05se0i.htm (6827 words)

	Michael Tooley's Philosophy Home Page
		The thrust of the first is that there are possible causal worlds to which reductionist accounts of the direction of causation do not apply, while that of the second is that there are possible causal worlds for which reductionist accounts yield wrong answers with respect to the direction of causal processes.
		For any reductionist account of the latter in terms of the structure exhibited by events in time cannot possibly generate the right results in both cases for two worlds that are 'inverted twins' - such as the two worlds just described.
		For on a reductionist view, P's causing M is logically supervenient upon the non-causal properties of, and the non-causal relations between, P and M, together with the causal laws.
	spot.colorado.edu /~tooley/CausationSection4.html (4480 words)

	Chapter 1, Section 2 - Integrative Biology
		It could be argued that science is fundamentally reductionist in its methodology, and that as biology progresses, its explanations must be on an increasingly small scale.
		The difference between reductionist and integrative biology is not simply a philosophical distinction; the integrative approach to biology differs dramatically from reductionist biology in both its goals and its methods.
		While the goal of reductionist biology is to understand life in terms of simple deterministic principles analogous to Newtonian physics or chemistry (Savageau 1991), the goal of integrative biology is to understand the structure, function, and history of organisms and their environments.
	www.lclark.edu /~autumn/Dissertation/Chapter1S2.html (681 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		The reductionist approach is based on the belief that a whole can be largely understood by examining its constituent parts; i.e.
		The reductionist tendency is to step forwards and look into activity in detail; the holistic tendency is to step backwards and look at activity only in the context of other activity.
		The reductionist idea that each component within an attack contributes to the entirety of the attack in a manner that is independent of the other components, must be rejected.
	www.phrack.org /phrack/57/p57-0x0b (2542 words)

	Reductionism Primer and Sample Writings (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Reductionists should be thought of as spanning a continuum, stretching toward, but never as far as, the borders of mysticism.
		All reductionists would agree that it is desirable to try to explain a (repeatablly) observed phenomenon in terms of the most basic level of physical theory possible, and that an explanation that relies upon F=ma, the most basic level, is the ultimate goal.
		The hard core reductionist rejects the notion of the hypothetical and groundless forces identified in the diagram as "free will, prayer, God, etc." Without these mythical "forces" only the forces of gravity, electromagnetism and the nuclear ones are operational (acknowledging that QP is to be invoked where appropriate).
	www.reductionism.net /brucegary3/reductionism (3272 words)

	Reductionism in the Psychology of the Eighties: Can Biochemistry Eliminate Addiction, Mental Illness, and Pain?
		Yet what most reveals the trend toward reductionist thought is the extent to which psychologists as a group have turned to the biological sciences for direction and for theoretical underpinnings to their work.
		That psychologists, among others, view reductionist approaches to psychology as inherently more scientific raises the issue of how science evaluates competing theories, for the use of reductionist theories and the overall viewpoint they represent will be worthwhile only to the extent that they can be shown to have greater validity than alternative approaches.
		At the present time, however, when the claims made for reductionist explanations have become so all-encompassing, it is important to express a contrary position, namely, that some problems may only be meaningfully analyzed at a social or a psychological level.
	www.peele.net /lib/reduct.html (8256 words)

	Reality versus Reductionism
		We can take a moderately reductionist viewpoint and observe that the wave is “really” just a bunch of rope-particles or chain-particles moving up and down.
		The reductionist viewpoint is sometimes useful but sometimes not.
		Whether the reductionists like it or not, the wave does have properties that transcend its embodiment in a particular medium.
	www.av8n.com /physics/reality-reductionism.htm (960 words)

	Genetically engineered foods: The hazards are inherent in the technology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		They claim to solve problems that reductionist science and the agro- and chemical industries have created in the first place - hunger for many of the world's populations, widespread environmental deterioration and accumulation of toxic wastes.
		It is a reductionist, manipulative and exploitative science that denies there are organic wholes such as organisms, societies and community of nations.
		Reductionist science has given us the unsustainable intensive agriculture of the Green Revolution, which has also contributed to the world ecological crisis.
	www.twnside.org.sg /title/mwho-cn.htm (1515 words)

	20th WCP: Parfit, the Reductionist View, and Moral Commitment
		According to a Reductionist, persons are nothing over and above the existence of certain mental and/or physical states and their various relations.
		Just as we are not apt to think that a social club has any ontological status over and above the existence of its members and their relations to one another, so too the Reductionist claims that we should not take persons to exist apart from the various physical and psychological events that characterize them.
		Rather, I would like to raise some questions as to whether or not the theories of rationality and morality resulting from his views do indeed represent an improvement in the way that Parfit thinks they do over their more common counterparts.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/PPer/PPerPalm.htm (3294 words)

	An Evolution Theory in the Tradition of Panpsychism
		Reductionist causal laws do not explain why sub-systems which are useful for the whole reproduce themselves instead of disappearing after having appeared by chance.
		Although reductionists claim that these properties can be explained by reductionist causal laws, their explanations are essentially based on finality and are similar to this one:
		Reductionists have resolved the problem of the missing genetic information by an argument, which is based on a famous philosophical error.
	members.lol.li /twostone/E/psychon.html (7339 words)

	DPGS - programme
		Thales was a reductionist pur sang because he tried to reduce the complex world to one simple, fundamental principle.
		The reductionist claims that, for example, the formation and behaviour of mountains, rivers, living organisms, and even societies, are to be studied by analyzing the parts of which these phenomena consist (in the last instance, elementary particles).
		This reductionist view was further developed in the 1950s by the philosophers Hilary Putnam and Paul Oppenheim, and Ernest Nagel.
	www.frw.ruu.nl /fg/philosophy/abstrhr.htm (683 words)

	Reductionist Materialism and its Demise (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		To a hard materialist 'spirit' or 'soul' means nothing and he or she does not have much time for 'consciousness'; to them 'mind' is the brain or nothing more than the 'working of the brain'.
		A reductionist, reductive materialist, says that anything complex can be understood only by 'reducing' it to simpler parts or to its basic constituents.
		The reductionist materialists are not bothered with this kind of Holistic 'greater-ness' which to them is nothing more than a 'Namby-Pamby concept'.
	www.humandynamicwholeness.org /Reductionist_Materialism.html (1012 words)

	The politics of knowledge at the CBD (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		However, the mechanistic and reductionist assumptions on which the last few centuries of evolution of dominant Western science were based are being given up by emergent Western sciences themselves.
		The idea that modern reductionist science is a description of objective reality, unprejudiced by value judgements, is being rejected increasingly on historical and philosophical grounds.
		The emergent theories of complexity, dissipative structures and self-organisation that are replacing the reductionist paradigm of biology have more in common philosophically with traditional systems of knowledge than with Cartesian science.
	www.twnside.org.sg /title/cbd-cn.htm (1522 words)

	Bridging the Gap Between the Reductionist Perspective of Public Policy and the Precautionary Perspective of Communities (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		The conflict between the precautionary and reductionist perspectives is apparent in the issues surrounding the development and transport of oil on the North Slope of Alaska to the port at Valdez, and ultimately to oil refineries geographically dispersed around the United States.
		Many reductionists consider this unscientific form of risk assessment to have no expert authority, and they argue the data is unreliable.
		The use of the reductionist perspective forces policymakers to rely on risk assessment techniques that may or may not form environmental policies which guide the use and development of the natural environment.
	egj.lib.uidaho.edu /egj11/miller1.html (5533 words)

	CADDblog: Reductionist thinking (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		That is, we tend to focus on the physicochemical behaviour of drug compounds docking with receptor targets.
		Hence, we take the reductionist view of drug discovery and design as a series of docking events between small-molecule compounds and their targets.
		Perhaps reductionist and integrative approaches should be pursued simultaneously.
	rmcsoft.blogspot.com /2004/10/reductionist-thinking.html (224 words)

	Religion and Science
		Similarly a reductionist in biology might claim that biology tells the heart of the story of mind and culture.
		A reductionist in physics and chemistry might claim that physics and chemistry tell the heart of the story of life.
		It can be that a religiously affirmative person and a reductionist can accept or very nearly accept long portions of each other's account of the phenomena of religion.
	fp.dl.kent.edu /21020/science.htm (1291 words)

	Reductionist (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
		Of or relating to the theory of reductionism; "reductionist arguments".
		"Reductionist" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 100.00% of the time.
		"Reductionist" is used about 73 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English.
	www.websters-online-dictionary.org /re/reductionist.html (406 words)

	mike king - writings - electronic arts - The New Metaphysics and the Deep Structure of Creativity and Cognition
		The reductionist writings by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Frances Crick and Stephen Jay Gould are a natural extension of Laplace's determinism, though filled with the passion that Einstein calls beauty and grandeur.
		The reductionist metaphysics is practised with vigour today, though it is significant that it derives mainly from biological science where reductionist determinism holds more strongly than in physics.
		The reductionists would prefer to say the deep structure of the universe, and to leave out the subjective human element, but perhaps despite themselves the reductionists write endlessly about the human implications of their science.
	web.ukonline.co.uk /mr.king/writings/earts/cc399.html (6200 words)

	OREGON CYBER THEATRE
		It is typical to meet scientists who change their reductionist theory every few years, and every time claim that this is a universal theory of everything.
		On the other hand, when you talk to them in person, you appreciate that their reductionist view is only to express their views uniformly and self-advertize, which is necessary for getting funding and recognition of their ideas.
		The reductionists do the same mistake as religions have done in their early phases; to treat what is symbolic, literally; and what is analogous, as a one-to-one mapping.
	www.ee.pdx.edu /~mperkows/ISMVL/oregon-theatre.html (9046 words)

	ACSH > Health Issues >
		In spite of the vast array of benefits that the world has derived from science (and technology), its critics denounce it by a number of pejoratives, such as "logophallocentric," that have little meaning except to the critics.
		Little evidence is required for grand and often simplistic "holistic" theories — and few useful predictions or discoveries come from them — though their advocates insist on using them to describe the world.
		Few ideas in modern thought are more "reductionist" — in the sense of absurdly oversimplifying things — than the oft-repeated assertion that modern science is mere reductionism and thus fails to explain the world.
	www.acsh.org /healthissues/newsID.565/healthissue_detail.asp (982 words)

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