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When did reductionism become a dirty word?

• sgentle 13y ago
  I've noticed this too. I blame a combination of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and not knowing what the word actually means. From my observation, it appears people assume "reductionist" means "simplistic" as opposed to "representing a complex system as no more than the sum of its components". To be honest, I think it's just an etymological problem: "reduction" sounds bad, so "reductionism" sounds bad. The grandparent here follows this pattern. Using the actual meaning, it would be paradoxical for an approximation to be reductionist. In fact, it's quite the opposite. A reductionist would hold that the most accurate high-level model of a brain would be the most low-level model of a brain. If we could model each atom precisely then we would, necessarily, model the whole brain precisely. The whole thing is pretty amusing when you take into account that anyone who manipulates software or systems in any serious way needs to engage in reductionism to be able to work. It's not as if "first, we write module A, then module B, then a system magically appears from the ether" is a viable architecture. At least, not since we stopped taking neural nets seriously.
  • bbgm 13y ago
    Reductionism is fundamental to science. There are places where it shows it limits, but I've always equated being reductionist with being clever, with taking a complex question and re-casting it in terms that can be measured/studied using the current state of the art.