Assumption that: the whole is equal to the sum of its parts
Attitude of Modernism and industrialism of reducing things to their components, functions and what can be measured, losing sight of the whole. An almost opposite perspective is Systems Thinking.
Scientific reductionism
“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it”. Alfred North Whitehead
there can be no theories of emergence without reductionism
A confusion also arises from the way the word reductionism can be used as an antonym of emergence. It should be stated force-fully that there can be no theories of emergence without reduc-tionism. Reductionism is used in two senses: reductionism as reducing all phenomena to a minimal set of elementary parti-cles, waves, fields, symmetries and so forth (ontological); and reductionism as reducing a model and theory to an empirically justifiable minimal set of assumptions, transformations and interactions (epistemological). The first kind of reduction is only practiced by particle physicists and other fields that envy their style of demolition. The second kind of reduction, described as parsimony or compression, is pursued to varying degrees by all scholars, from cell biologists to historians, for the simple reason that there needs to be a basis for selecting a finite set of causal factors from an infinite set. David Krakauer
nutritional reductionism | Effective Altruism | quantification infuses a false sense of security | the map is not the territory | techno-capital optimism