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Topic: Scientific reductionism

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	Reference.com/Encyclopedia/Reductionism
		Reductionism in philosophy is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things.
		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).
		Scientific reductionism has been used to describe all of the above ideas as they relate to science, but is most often used to describe the idea that all phenomena can be reduced by scientific explanations.
	www.reference.com /browse/wiki/Reductionism (1325 words)

	Scientific reductionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		One 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.
		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.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Scientific_reductionism (908 words)

	On Reductionism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		Reductionism collapses (or reduces) the higher level of meaning and being into the lower level of elemental parts; when this collapse occurs what is left is not the whole but its parts.
		Reductionism -- the skeptical and hostile attitude of the modern mind to the traditional image of man -- destroys those comprehensive entities (meaningful wholes) necessary to man's humanity: it "reduces" certain key concepts (entities): 'person', 'tradition', 'community', 'speech', 'action', and others to the particulars in which these entities are rooted.
		The problem with scientific reductionism arises from the fact that the history of science in the modern period is not of a "pure" discipline -- the cause of science has been one not only of method but vision.
	smith2.sewanee.edu /texts/Ecology/OnReductionism.html (2860 words)

	Reductionism
		Reductionism does not hold the answers to the questions that should be asked about the mind as it leads to an infinite reducibility.
		A third argument against reductionism in the pursuit of understanding the mind is its emphasis on isolating both the parts of the mind and the mind itself.
		Karl Schmitz-Moormann warns against reductionism and that the mind is not thought of as simply a “helpful structure for the continuing life of humankind,” but that “[it is] also the stored experiences of the human mind: the possibilities opened up by the emergence of the human mind and the new human experiences” (256).
	www.cord.edu /faculty/steinwan/nv13_narum.htm (3594 words)

	Logophobia - Eric Voegelin on SCIENTISM - The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1999 - Author: Michael P. Federici Eric ...
		Observers of the contemporary intellectual climate are all too familiar with the influence of scientism—also referred to as positivism, radical empiricism, scientific reductionism, or scientific naturalism—on conventional attitudes and scholarly opinion.
		Scientifically derived truth, then, provides a body of knowledge that forms the foundation of political and social consensus.
		Once the scientific method is widely utilized, differences of opinion, and the corresponding political and social conflict that is caused by them, wither away.
	evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com /federici.htm (3659 words)

	Orthomolecular Nutrition and Megavitamins
		Since it is the existence of supportive scientific evidence which is frequently claimed to validate medicine and distinguish it from nutrition and natural therapies, it is pertinent that we explore the nature of scientific evidence.
		In spite of overwhelming scientific evidence of the failure of medicine however, there are still some who refuse to accept this evidence, perhaps even seeking to blame patients for the failings of medicine (see Integrated Medicine).
		At a time when the scientific world was mesmerised by the use of toxic symptom suppressing drugs, these pioneers of orthomolecular nutrition were clearly motivated by a commitment to truth which separated them from so many of their colleagues.
	www.holistichealthtopics.com /HMG/nutrition.html (13648 words)

	Samenvatting -- Reduction and the Image of Man
		Scientific reductionism is thought to be degrading to humanity since it implies 'nothing but' thinking.
		Scientific change is mostly a protracted process in which reference is usually preserved; science is not characterized by sudden revolutionary shifts.
		Although the interanimation between scientific theories may lead to the correction and re-evaluation of the lay view of human beings, scientific advances do not generally force upon us a "nothing but" intepretation of man. As we have explained, complicated and incessant back-and-forth interactions between levels of analysis are the driving force behind much scientific progress.
	drcwww.uvt.nl /~mkdschou/website/summarydiss.html (4451 words)

	Physics, Reductionism, and the Real World - Physics Today March 2006
		Ellis's statement about reductionism is analogous to saying "the hypothesis that marbles will be blue in the year 1 billion AD" has no predictive power.
		Ellis then says, "Everyday experience suggests that such a belief [complete reductionism] is wrong." But as he has already pointed out, we use different models and different language to simplify and understand phenomena at different levels of the hierarchy.
		So whether or not complete reductionism is true, we would not expect the language and ideas of one level to adapt themselves well to phenomena of another.
	www.physicstoday.org /vol-59/iss-3/p12.html (853 words)

	Medical Reductionism
		Although hundreds of years have passed, Western scientific medicine still holds the same basic philosophy, but are more sophisticated in studying biological mechanisms at a molecular level.
		This is partly due to a conflict between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ philosophies and has its roots in the division of science and religion along with the destruction of folk medicine in both U.S. and Europe.
		Scientific cancer research has failed to find a 'cure' because it is looking in the wrong places with the wrong tools.
	www.simonthescribe.co.uk /articles/Templates/MedReduction.htm (1329 words)

	(The Anthropik Network) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		Scientific reductionism is the cornerstone of modern scientific thought.
		Reductionism is the philosophical foundation whereby scientists try to reduce a problem to its most basic components, control for other factors, and test only a single hypothesis at a time.
		You are currently browsing the archives for the tags scientific reductionism.
	anthropik.com /index.php/tag/scientific-reductionism (285 words)

	Science and Design
		This is important, because for a claim to be scientifically falsifiable, it must have the possibility of being true.
		Scientific reductionism holds that everything is reducible to scientific categories.
		Scientific reductionism is self-refuting and easily seen to be self-refuting.
	www.leaderu.com /ftissues/ft9810/articles/dembski.html (4879 words)

	Neurosciences and the Self
		But the answer to reductionism can be found, she assured us, in recent developments in the philosophy of mind.
		Scientific reduction, she concluded, is an ongoing challenge to all in academia today.
		The "over determinism" in the third panel is a result of the derivation of the kitty-cornered arrow from the first (Identity) panel, and the importation of the top horizontal arrow from M to M from the second (epiphenomenalist) panel.
	www.godless.org /sci/murphy.html (2017 words)

	Past Conferences
		Reductionism is the analytical tool first elaborated by Descartes in his Discourse on Method: take any problem, divide it into its smallest parts, figure out how the parts work, then add them back together, and hope that the sum of the parts will allow you to understand the whole.
		Epistemological reductionism claims that the laws and theories of all the sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry.
		Scientific theories, philosophical ideas, and cultural movements are "socially constructed" in one sense, but in another sense even these social constructions are conditioned by archetypal, psychological realities–realities deeply rooted in the world-fabric.
	www.bradley.edu /org/asc/conferences/1998/fideler.htm (7901 words)

	Psychiatric News Main Frame
		This line of reasoning is the economic analog of the scientific reductionism now in vogue, he observed.
		Scientific reductionism has "bedeviled our field for generations and generations," remarked Scully.
		Despite its pitfalls, reductionism has been a boon to those campaigning against stigma and for enhanced insurance coverage of mental illness, said Scully, for it has permitted them to describe mental illnesses as "brain disorders." But the shift has also occasioned the loss of a more comprehensive view of human behavior.
	www.psych.org /pnews/97-12-05/scully.html (780 words)

	Goldsmith: Whatever happened to ecology?.
		But this principle became an embarrassment to scientific ecologists and had to be discredited so as both to justify the systematic replacement of complex forest ecosystems and traditional agricultural ecosystems with the endless stretches of monoculture required to satisfy the requirements of our modern economy.
		It must be clear to all that as a result of this transformation mainstream scientific ecology no longer reflects the ecological or cosmic world-view of primal people, of the natural theologists, of the Romantic poets, of the early academic ecologists, nor of the environmental or ecological movement of today.
		But as ecology became 'scientific' and respectable it was revived with alacrity just as Darwinism was revived under the guise of neo-Darwinism with the rediscovery by the scientific world of Mendel's reductionist genetics that for a long time had been ignored.
	www.edwardgoldsmith.com /page21.html (3462 words)

	The Individualist: Holism
		Not a scientific discipline itself, it defines a philosophical lens by which emergence is taken into account when applying the scientific method, often within a wider interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary mode of inquiry.
		This practice is in contrast to a purely analytic tradition (sometimes called reductionism) which proports to understand systems by dividing them into their smallest possible or discernible elements and understanding their elemental properties alone.
		Not a scientific field in itself, and interdisciplinary by definition, integral theory is the pursuit of knowledge through a combination of scientific and spiritual approaches.
	www.dadamo.com /wiki/wiki.pl/Holism (1337 words)

	[No title]
		Weinberg distinguishes between grand reductionism and petty reductionism; the former pertains to the general validity of fundamental laws, whereas the latter refers to the relations between the constituents of matter on different levels of complexity, aggregation, etc.
		Scientific research, but in a more general way this is true for the global cognitive exploration of humanity, takes place as an interplay of synthesis and analysis.
		The insight that reductionism, be it petty or grand, may not be the ultimate situation of the nature of reality, is a synthetic type of insight.
	pespmc1.vub.ac.be /AFOS/ReducReactions.html (15145 words)

	Apologetics Press - Scientific Humanism
		To adopt such a scientific approach unreservedly is to accept as ultimate in all matters of fact and real existence the appeal to the evidence of experience alone; a court subordinate to no higher authority, to be overridden by no prejudice, however comfortable (Kurtz, 1973, p.
		Scientific reductionism or “Scientism”—as it is often called—is similar to this fisherman with the special net.
		In the words of Sir Arthur Keith of Great Britain: “Therein lies the weakness of their case, for the human mind craves for a solution of the great mystery and is restless until it is satisfied as to its place in the great scheme of the universe” (1928).
	www.apologeticspress.org /articles/1997 (1850 words)

	Natural Medicine, Herbal Medicine and CFS
		Read also about scientific evidence which reveals that the only way for many people to avoid a B vitamin deficiency is to take a supplement.
		Given the fragmented reductionist nature of modern health care it is pertinent that we consider whether human illness fully abides by the rules of scientific reductionism.
		This type of general cell sickness has been termed "generalised cytopathy" (2) and contrasts sharply with the modern scientific concept of illness which is commonly considered to be confined to a specific organ or tissue of the body (2).
	www.holistichealthtopics.com /HMG/topics.html (1322 words)

	[No title]
		Reductionism is criticized for its inability to account for the emergent phenomena of complex systems which cannot be explained by giving an account of the nature and interconnection of the system's components.
		This effect is clearest when the scalpel of scientific reductionism is turned toward systems such as society, the family, or the individual.
		We are currently in the midst of yet another scientific revolution, one which has spawned a generation of mystic prophets who profess that the new religion of science is being conceived in the idealistic interpretation of the quantum realm.
	www.phys.lsu.edu /students/dhall/NWR/V2/NWR2.003_Jan96.html (2688 words)

	Introduction to the Theory of Enformed Systems
		TES is radically related to the prevailing scientific worldviews because it's a theory of organization per se--the root of all organized systems.
		The case in point is the method of reductionism, the most pervasive myth of normal science.
		The possum principle applies to reductionism because dividing a possum into two parts irreversibly annihilates the essential quality of the whole possum: its organization, i.e., the "map" of the relationships among its parts in space and time.
	www.enformy.com /tesintro.htm (1428 words)

	Do Ideas Count? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		As they see it, scientific progress is like biological evolution: no particular life-form is destined to emerge, and lots of different ones might have turned out to be equally good at survival.
		Obviously reductionism is being given short shrift in the Science Wars, but I submit that it lurks in the arena.
		Popper thought that scientific language has fixed meaning, and therefore scientific knowledge is objective and absolute.
	home.comcast.net /~dantsmith/nexu26.htm (8583 words)

	Dr. Daniel H. Duffy Sr. Response to Pediatrics article (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		The introduction of medical quackery into a society is a gradual thing and is accomplished mainly through fragmentation (the scientific reductionism that examines the part and ignores the whole).
		Scientific reductionism is the only possible way to generate and establish such quackery.
		The current scientific love affair with the virus is based upon junk science that arises out of fractionated approaches divorced from the real world.
	www.vaccinationnews.com /dailynews/June2001/DuffyRePedArt.htm (3947 words)

	The Unravelling Of Our Genetic Structure: What Makes Us Human?
		We are creatures capable of great scientific, human and artistic achievement but also creatures who are flawed, who often fail, perhaps inevitably, to live up to our better selves and our possibilities.
		Such reductionism is related to the second potential danger that the new discovery presents.
		We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
	www.commondreams.org /views/090200-102.htm (1083 words)

	adduonline.com/Social
		Reductionism is wholly appropriate in many laboratory situations.
		The grandfather of all genetic reductionism theories was a monk called Mendel.
		Reductionism and scientific thought is an attitude that seeps deep into the Western mind set.
	www.adduonline.com /articles/reduct.htm (1644 words)

	Science and Religious Belief page 1 overview: general compatibility of science and religious belief.
		There are those who try to extend scientific knowledge beyond its proper realm, that of explaining the workings of the physical world, and to forge a philosophical pretense.
		The scientific methodoligcal procedure proceeds from the notion that we gain understanding of the material realm by breaking down its components into their smallest aggregate parts to understand how they function.
		All of the early modern scientific greats were Christians, and not merely because "everyone was," most of them (Newton especially) were exptremely devout (even the persecuted Galileo).But it is not only because of the rise of great Christian thinkers that science owes its birth to Christianity.
	www.geocities.com /metacrock2000/science/science1.html (1404 words)

	Task Force for Veterinary Science: Ethnoveterinary Medicine
		For the benefit of non-cultural-anthropologists, “reductionism” is the intellectual tool by which scientists attempt to understand complex phenomena and things by “reducing” them to their constituent parts and underlying principles.
		While reductionism is merely one among many tools employed by science, cultural constructivists and various other non-scientist critics of science claim that “Western science” is embodied by and limited to reductionism.
		Scientific testing, while perhaps “ethnoincorrect,” actually provides a means of determining what works and what doesn’t.
	www.vet-task-force.com /SW41Imr.htm (9609 words)

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