Sublime

This implies that one should be able to understand all aspects of complex structures – plants, animals, or the human body – by reducing them to their smallest constituent parts. This philosophical position is known as Cartesian reductionism.

A reductionist thinks that science is about analysing things into components. An instrumentalist thinks that it is about predicting things.

If there are such indivisible parts and we come to understand them and their behavior, then complete understanding of the world is possible, at least in principle. Therefore, the belief in elements is a fundamental underpinning of the Machine-Age view of the world. The doctrine that asserts this belief is called reductionism:…

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That is to say, science allegedly explains things reductively – by analysing them into components.

Reducing

Reductionists think that all scientific explanations, and perhaps all sufficiently deep explanations of any kind, take that form.

This has given rise to a widespread misconception about emergence and explanation, known as reductionism: the doctrine that science always explains and predicts things reductively, i.e. by analysing them into components.