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Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts. Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide an explanation in terms of ever-smaller entities. Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb an older one, but reduces it to more basic terms ...
Determinism should not be confused with the self-determination of human actions by reasons, motives, and desires. Determinism is about interactions which affect cognitive processes in people's lives. [4] It is about the cause and the result of what people have done. Cause and result are always bound together in cognitive processes.
Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, [1] is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of the environment, whether in embryonic development or in learning. [2] Genetic reductionism is a similar concept, but it ...
Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism. [1] [2] This philosophical theory suggests that higher-level properties and phenomena arise from the interactions and organization of lower-level entities yet are not reducible to these simpler components. It emphasizes the idea that ...
Thomas Nagel (/ ˈ n eɪ ɡ əl /; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher.He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, [3] where he taught from 1980 until his retirement in 2016. [4]
The opposite of reductionism is holism, a word coined by Jan Smuts in Holism and Evolution, that understanding a system can be done only as a whole.One form of antireductionism (epistemological) holds that we simply are not capable of understanding systems at the level of their most basic constituents, and so the program of reductionism must fail.
Lickliter and Honeycutt have stated that the assumption of genetic determinism is most evident in the theory that learning and reasoning are governed by innate, domain-specific modules. Evolutionary psychologists assume that modules preexist individual development and lie dormant in the structure of the organism, awaiting activation by some ...
There is a need now to move away from scientism and the ideology of cause-and-effect determinism toward a radical empiricism, such as William James proposed, as an epistemology of science. [ 4 ] These perspectives are not new and in the early twentieth century, William James noted that rationalist science emphasized what he termed fragmentation ...