Reductionism

Holism vs. Reductionism

In his Pulitzer-prizewinning book,
computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter
identifies two concepts—holism and
reductionism—that turn out to be
important as you begin to learn about
programming.
Hofstadter explains these concepts using
a dialogue in the style of Lewis Carroll:
Achilles: I will be glad to indulge both of you, if you will first oblige me, by telling
me the meaning of these strange expressions, “holism” and
“reductionism”.
Crab: Holism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It’s simply the
belief that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. No one in his
right mind could reject holism.
Anteater: Reductionism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It’s simply
the belief that “a whole can be understood completely if you understand
its parts, and the nature of their ‘sum’”. No one in her left brain could
reject reductionism.
 Reductivism

• Reductionism:
– We can reduce a clock to its components, such as
springs and wheels, to understand its functioning
– Implies that analyzing or reducing the universe to
its simplest parts will produce understanding of it
– Characteristic of every science
Reductionism
 The Astonishing Hypothesis
"The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You", your joys and your sorrows,
your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal
identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast
assembly of nerve cells and their associated
molecules.“
Francis Crick: The Astonishing Hypothesis. The
Scientific Search for the Soul (1994)
 Physicalism as a reductive doctrine
• Every domain of discourse is reducible to fundamental
physics
• This can not be done all in one step
• E.g., persons talk reduces to psychology, psychology
reduces to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to
physics, etc.
• The best language to talk about persons, or brains, etc.
is not the language of fundamental physics
• We can conceptualize the same phenomenon (at least in
principle) in different discourses
 Reductionism
• For example, atomism is a form of reductionism in
that it holds that everything in the Universe can be
broken down into a few simple entities
(elementary particles) and laws and interactions
among them.
• Modern chemistry reduces chemical properties to
ninety or so basic elements (kinds of atoms) and
their rules of combination.
 Reductionism
• Reductionism (Mechanistic Outlook): The
world is like a machine (eg clock) – the
parts can fully explain the whole There is a
legitimate use of reductionism in science
when macro phenomena are explained in
terms of underlying micro processes
 Reductionism

• To a reductionist, once a set of equations or

mathematical relations has been found to
describe a system, then the behavior of the
system is considered to be explained.
 Reductivism
• Reductionism is very similar to, and has its
roots from, Occam's Razor, which states
that between competing ideas, the simplest
theory that fits the facts of a problem is the
hat should be selected.
 Types of Reductionism

• Theoretical Reductionism
• Methodological Reductionism
• Ontological Reductionism
 Ontological Reductionism
• Its about what that exist
• It’s the belief that reality is composed of a
minimum number of kind
• Example Dualist/ Monist
 Methodological Reductionism
• It is the idea that a complex systems are most
fruitfully investigated at the lowest/ most
basic level
• The best scientific strategy is to attempt to
reduce explanations to the smallest possible
entities.
• Atomic explanation vs Chemical explanation
which is better?
 Theoretical Reduction

• What’s at issue here is “theories” (not phenomena)

• Theories—that is, structured sets of linguistic
statements—are what either do or don’t get reduced.
• And, traditionally, it has been argued that one theory
(TR) is reduced by another theory (TB) when you can
logically derive TR from TB.
 So what is “theoretical reduction”

• So, we say that modern chemistry is reduced by

modern physics because the laws of chemistry
(how molecules bind or don’t bind, how acid
works, etc.) can be deduced from the laws of
physics (the behavior of atoms and electrons,
etc.)
Or, for the visually-minded
The Explanandum or Explananda (pl)

S1 Law in TR
S2

Bridge Bridge
Law Law
The Explanans

P1 Law in TB
P2
 Intertheoretic Reduction
• Certain (usually older) theories can be seen as special cases of other (usually newer)
theories.
• We say the older theory reduces to, or is reduced by, the newer theory.
 Kepler’s planetary astronomy reduces to Newton’s Laws of Motion
 Newton’s Laws of Motion reduce to Einstein’s General Relativity
 Common sense theory of sound reduces to physical theory of compression waves in
a medium
 Common sense theory of heat reduces to kinetic theory
• A genuine reduction occurs when, in the newer theory, we can derive a set of
claims about certain objects and their relations which are relevantly isomorphic to
(sufficiently mirror) the claims of the old theory
– Note that this is a matter of degree
 Within Newton’s system, one can basically deduce Kepler’s system
 Within General Relativity, Newton’s Laws turn out only to be very close
approximations requiring the assumption of low masses, low velocities, and short
distances

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Newton, Einstein, and Gravity

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 Intertheoretic Reduction
 When a Reduction occurs, the language of the old theory may be
dispensed with, but (a significant amount of) the structure of the old
theory lives on within the new theory
 Thus reduced theories are NOT eliminated
 They are, in a sense, given legitimacy
 They are incorporated into a new and more encompassing theory
 Identity Theorists think that FP will reduce to Neurology
 Functionalists and Classical AI theorists think that FP will reduce
to a more abstract theory of formally specified symbols and
operations

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 Earth at Geocentric Universe
Aristotle: Ptolemy:
. Earth is at the center of the . 100 A.D
Universe . Refined Aristotle’s model
. ‘Prime Movers’ responsible . Calculation devise for
for movement of astronomical
planets and stars. predictions.

Dominant view for over 2000 years. 37

An earth-centered universe

From Peter Apian, Cosmographia 38

(1524)
Enter Copernicus …

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 Heliocentric Model
Nicolaus Copernicus (1514)
. Geocentric model too complicated . . . Ockham’s Razor?
. First attempts resulted in worse
predictions

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 Galileo
. Modified the telescope created in 1608 to magnify objects
30 times
. He increasingly believed that the
geocentric picture was wrong

. Published “Dialogue Concerning the

two
world system: Ptolemaic and
Copernican
“On the Revolutions”,
(published when he was on
his deathbed.)

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A sun-centered universe. But it’s still all circles
…

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Beauty …
what
beauty?
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Kepler says it’s ellipses …

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 Kepler
• Used Tycho Brahe’s astronomical data to
infer elliptical planetary orbits
• Gave three laws of planetary motion
- elliptical planetary orbits
- equal time sweeps equal area
- relation between time period and average distance

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Circles vs. Ellipses

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Kepler’s First Law of Planetary Motion

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Kepler’s Second Law of Planetary Motion

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Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion
 Planets orbit the Sun in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.
 The line joining the Sun and a planet sweeps out equal areas
in equal times.
 The square of the period of the orbit T is proportional to
the cube of the major axis d.

The first law tells us the shape of a planet’s orbit.

The second law tells us how fast the planet moves around
its orbit.
The third law tells us how to compare the periods of
different orbits.
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Kepler describes the observations, but he
does not explain anything.

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Why do planets follow these rules?
 Newton
The laws of physics until the time of Newton’s, involved
only space and time.

Newton for the first time introduced

the concept of mass in the laws of
physics.

Revolutionary implication: Same

underlying law for all massive objects!

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 Principia : Definitions
Principia defines three “Fundamental quantities”

Length, Time, Mass

Meter Second Kilogram

as measurable and objective.

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Newton explains planetary motion where
Kepler fails…….

There’s a force.
It’s the same force that makes apples
fall,
And tides rise, and holds galaxies
Together. 54
The Universal Law of Gravity
• Any two bodies are attracting each
other through gravitation, with a force
proportional to the product of their
masses and inversely proportional to
the square of their distance:

Mm
F=-G
r2

(G is the Universal constant of gravity.)

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Newton’s Law of Gravitation

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 Important points
Kepler’s Laws follow as a consequence of
Newton’s Law of Gravity. Newton gives us
deeper understanding of why planets move
as they do, and why ellipses are preferred
over circles.


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 Kepler’s Laws Explained
• All three of Kepler’s
law can be explained
by Newton’s gravity
• Ellipses are special
cases: bound orbits
• 2nd law follows from
central force and
conservation of angular
momentum
• Newton’s form of
Kepler’s 3rd law:
p2 = 4 2 a3
G(M1+M2)

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 It’s not a force.
Mass warps space and time.
Apples and planets and galaxies
Just move along paths
Of least resistance.

1
Rab  Rg ab  8 GTab
2

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New Description of Gravity as Curvature of Space-Time

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 Q. Why do planets follow elliptical path? (Kepler)
A. Because of the Nature of gravitational force.
(Newton)

Q. Why do massive bodies attract each other?

(Newton)
A. Because massive bodies curve space-time
fabric. (Einstein)

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 The “Reductive Materialism”
hypothesis

• The “Reductive Materialism” hypothesis:

 social sciences can be reduced to (i.e. explained
by appeal to) psychology
 psychology can be reduced to biology
 biology can be reduced to chemistry
 chemistry can be reduced to physics

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 Reductionism
• The Scientific Belief
• Our minds – the behavior of our
brains – can be explained by the
interactions of nerve cells (and
other cells) and the molecules
associated with them.
• [F. Crick. The Astonishing
Hypothesis. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons. 1994, p.7]
•A Scientific Theory of the
Mind
•By “scientific” … I mean a
description based on the
neuronal and phenotypic
organization of an individual and
formulated solely in terms of
physical and chemical
mechanisms giving rise to that
organization.
•[G.M. Edelman. The
remembered Present. New York:
Basic Books. 1989, pp. 8-9]
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 THE NEURAL BASIS OF ROMANTIC
LOVE
 Nothing is known about the neural substrates
involved in evoking one of the most overwhelming of
all affective states, that of romantic love.
 The activity in the brains of 17 subjects who were
deeply in love was scanned using fMRI, while they
viewed pictures of their partners.
 The activity was restricted to foci in the medial insula
and the anterior cingulate coretx and, subcortically, in
the caudate nucleus and the putamen.
• A unique network of areas is responsible for evoking
this affective state.
• Bartels A. & Zeki S. Neuroreport. 2000, 11 (17): 3829-34

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 Localization of Intelligence
• A recent study by Duncan et al. [7] has found evidence that
general intelligence is localized to regions of the lateral
prefrontal cortex.
• M. Atherton et al. Cognitive Brain Research, 16
(2003) 26-31, pg. 27

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