Reductionism

Reductionism has three types; the first two are philosophical, and the third is a common scientific strategy.

I. Ontological reductionism denies the being of higher levels of reality: “So-called spiritual reality is nothing but a psychological experience; psychological experience is nothing but a biological process; and a biological process is nothing but a set of biochemical events.”

II. Epistemological reductionism claims to explain a higher-level science wholly in terms of a lower-level science, for example, “Scientific theories using psychological terms can, in principle, be reduced to scientific theories using only biological terms; in the future scientists will be able to explain biological terms solely in terms of chemistry and physics.” So-called “non-reductive materialism” accepts ontological reductionism but rejects epistemological reductionism.

III. Methodological reductionism says, “In order to have a coherent and rigorous science, we exclude any hypotheses about spirit. For the purposes of this research program, we restrict our conclusions about spiritual experience to the language of neuroscience.” Note that religionists and atheists can in good faith co-author reports of methodologically restricted research. Nevertheless, methodological reductionism may be problematic, too, because it raises a crucial question in the philosophy of science. Science, scientia in Latin, means knowledge, which implies knowledge of the region of reality that it addresses. It would be absurd to claim to plumb the meaning of human action by the methods of chemistry. Should not the method appropriate to a given region of reality be attuned to that region itself? This observation does not imply that chemistry says nothing important about action, but it does imply that the meaningfulness of what chemistry tells us depends on a prior understanding of action itself. Making a commitment to a scientific method on account of its quantitative precision or other epistemological advantages can hobble access to the region to be known.