Questions tagged [reductionism]

54 questions
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What are the problems with reductionism?

It seems intuitive to me to think that if there is a basic substance or building block of nature (e.g. fermions and leptons, etc.), then all facts regarding entities comprised of that substance are reducible into facts about instances of said…
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Is Antireductionism a scientific position?

I read in Wikipedia: Antireductionism is a philosophical and scientific position that ... It seems to me that Antireductionism cannot be a scientific position as it is in direct conflict with physics which is a part of science(?). Physics makes…
BlowMaMind
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Are there purely-mathematics-based explanations of existence?

I'm asking for the name of a philosophy and any authors, books, or articles that explore a particular philosophy. The philosophy is motivated in part by a question of, "in what is our universe/multiverse hosted?". As best as I have collected it,…
Jason Kleban
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Can reductive explanation transcend human understanding?

This is more of a terminology question regarding the definition of reductive explanation. Suppose that it turned out there is a reductive explanation for consciousness to the physical, but the explanation exceeds any form of human understanding, yet…
Shandy
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Are there any scholarly books on the topic of “reductionism”?

By “reductionism” I mean a general tendency for people to make false assertions, inferences or extrapolations because they assume some situation is based on certain mechanisms or can be modeled in a certain way that is not accurate and fails to take…
julkarham
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