--- date: '2024-02-07' description: ontological, methodological, and theoretical reduction, with a tentative connection to compression and thingspace. id: reductionism modified: 2026-10-16 09:01:01 GMT-04:00 tags: - r/psychology title: reductionism created: '2024-02-07' published: '2024-02-07' pageLayout: default slug: thoughts/reductionism permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/reductionism.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- Reductionism concerns relations between entities, explanations, or theories at different levels. A connection with [[thoughts/Compression|compression]]: explaining several patterns through common underlying processes. The link to [[thoughts/being|becoming]] remains an open question. 1. Ontology: higher-level entities consist of lower-level entities. A biological example is the claim that organisms consist entirely of physical components and their interactions. This makes no claim about a minimum number of parts. 2. Methodology: investigate a system by studying its components and their interactions. Whether this strategy answers a particular question has to be established in that context. 3. Theory: recover one theory’s claims from another. In Nagel’s account, this involves derivation, sometimes using bridge principles connecting their terms. Corrections and approximations can be part of the relation; the theories’ ages do not define it. These claims can come apart: accepting physical composition alone does not establish that every biological explanation can be reduced to physics. See [reductionism in biology, §1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reduction-biology/) and [scientific reduction, §2](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/). ## thingspace see also: Related: [[thoughts/love]].