This is old, but yeah, reductionism is specifically western. It's derived from Descartes (who believed the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers, and

This is old, but yeah, reductionism is specifically western. It's derived from Descartes (who believed the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers, and introduced the idea of dualism - there's a world that exists, and a mind that understands), and from Newton, who developed calculus and established what has become the scientific method. Or, as a PhD physicist friend eloquently put it, "Before calculus, we didn't understand how the world worked. With calculus, we do." In the Newtonian/Cartesian world (reductionism), the entire physical world can be reduced to numbers. You measure and compute. If you don't understand, it's a failure of measurement, not of methodology. The problem is, this neglects many valid distinctions that the mind can recognize, but cannot be measured. In particular, it falls apart on problems of complexity, of interrelationships between many possible states of many possible elements.