Antireductionism

Antireductionism is a philosophical &/or scientific position that stands in contrast to reductionism (anti-holism) by advocating that not all properties of a system can be explained in terms of its constituent parts and their interactions. E.g. it is a fact of classical reductionistic physics--that the electromagnetic potential exists as a continuum . The opposite of reductionism is holism, that understanding a system can be done only as a whole. One form of antireductionism (epistemological) holds that we simply are not capable of understanding systems at the level of their most basic constituents, and so the program of reductionism must fail. The other kind of antireductionism (ontological) holds that such a complete explanation in terms of basic constituents is not possible even in principle for some systems. Robert Laughlin, e.g. supports this view. Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory embrace a non-reductionist view of science, sometimes going as far as explaining phenomena at a given level of hierarchy in terms of phenomena at a higher level, in a sense, the opposite of a reductionist approach.[26]

Although breaking complex phenomena into parts is a key method in science, there are those complex phenomena (e.g. in physics, psychology, sociology, ecology) where the approach does not work. Antireductionism also arises in academic fields such as history, economics, anthropology, medicine, and biology as dissatisfaction with attempts to explain complex phenomena using simplistic, ill-fitting models, which do not provide much insight.

An example of antireductionism in psychology is Davidson's proposed ontology of what he calls 'events' and its use "to provide an antireductionist answer to the mind/matter debate ...[and to show that]...the impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between...the mental and the physical."

Karl Popper was a famous proponent of antireductionism. In his book Of clouds and clocks, Popper classified phenomena into two types: "clock" phenomena with a mechanical basis and "cloud" phenomena which are indivisible and depend upon emergence for explanation.

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