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Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The aphorism "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts", typically attributed to Aristotle , is often given as a summary of this proposal. [ 4 ]
Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called holocultural studies or comparative studies, is a specialization in anthropology and sister sciences such as sociology, psychology, economics, political science that uses field data from many societies through comparative research to examine the scope of human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and culture.
The first notion, methodological holism, is the idea that actors are socialized and embedded into social structures and institutions that constrain, or enable, and generally shape the individuals' dispositions towards, and capacities for, action, and that this social structure should be taken as primary and most significant.
Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave.
His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested [14] that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into "organ inferiorities" and compensation. In his early career, Adler wrote an article in defence of Freud's theory after reading one of Freud's most well known works, The Interpretation of Dreams. [7]
This framework was introduced as a foundational assumption within the social sciences by Max Weber, and discussed in his book Economy and Society. [3] Within later schools of economic thought, such as the Austrian School, strict adherence to methodological individualism is considered a necessary starting principle.
This view is known as partial holism. One early advocate of partial confirmational holism is Adolf Grünbaum (1962). [4] Another is Ken Gemes (1993). [8] The latter provides refinements to the hypothetico-deductive account of confirmation, arguing that a piece of evidence may be confirmationally relevant only to some content parts of a hypothesis.
Richard Middleton (1990, p. 9-10) argues that "such theories always end up in some kind of reductionism – 'upwards', into an idealist cultural spirit, 'downwards', into economism, sociologism or technologism, or by 'circumnavigation', in a functionalist holism." However, he "would like to hang on to the notion of homology in a qualified sense.