On Reductionism I

"There is, indeed, a specific fault in our system of science, and in the resultant understanding of the natural world. […] This fault is reductionism, the view that effective understanding of a complex system can be achieved by investigating the properties of its isolated parts. The reductionist methodology, which is so characteristic of much of modern research, is not an effective means of analyzing the vast natural systems that are threatened by degradation." (Barry Commoner, "The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology", 1971)

"In the Systems Age we tend to look at things as part of larger wholes rather than as wholes to be taken apart. This is the doctrine of expansionism. Expansionism brings with it the synthetic mode of thought much as reductionism brought with it." (Russell L Ackoff, "Redesigning the future", 1974)

"Science gets most of its information by the process of reductionism, exploring the details, then the details of the details, until all the smallest bits of the structure, or the smallest parts of the mechanism, are laid out for counting and scrutiny. Only when this is done can the investigation be extended to encompass the whole organism or the entire system. So we say. Sometimes it seems that we take a loss, working this way." (Lewis Thomas, "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher", 1974)

"For any system the environment is always more complex than the system itself. No system can maintain itself by means of a point-for-point correlation with its environment, i.e., can summon enough 'requisite variety' to match its environment. So each one has to reduce environmental complexity - primarily by restricting the environment itself and perceiving it in a categorically preformed way. On the other hand, the difference of system and environment is a prerequisite for the reduction of complexity because reduction can be performed only within the system, both for the system itself and its environment." (Thomas Luckmann & Niklas Luhmann, "The Differentiation of Society", 1977)

"There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all […] Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain [...] there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment." (Francisco Varela, "On being autonomous: The lessons of natural history for systems theory", 1977)

"Reductionism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It’s simply the belief that a whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their ‘sum'. No one in her left brain could reject reductionism." (Douglas Hofstadter, "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid", 1979)

"Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are. (William Poundstone, "The Recursive Universe", 1985)

"The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects." (Leon M Ledermanm, "The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?", 1993)

"The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science." (Edward O. Wilson, "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", 1998)

"[...] information feedback about the real world not only alters our decisions within the context of existing frames and decision rules but also feeds back to alter our mental models. As our mental models change we change the structure of our systems, creating different decision rules and new strategies. The same information, processed and interpreted by a different decision rule, now yields a different decision. Altering the structure of our systems then alters their patterns of behavior. The development of systems thinking is a double-loop learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run, static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term, dynamic view and then redesign our policies and institutions accordingly." (John D Sterman, "Business dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)