Reductionism and Holism

9 Key excerpts on "Reductionism and Holism"

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  Issues, Debates and Approaches in Psychology

  • Ian Fairholm(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  holism. Holism focuses on whole phenomena and is not really interested in studying their isolated parts but instead stresses the need to understand the complex interactions that take place. You might be wondering whether either one of the two approaches is better. You might also be wondering which is the more appropriate for psychology. We’ll address this within the Section ‘Is reductionism appropriate for psychology’.

    Is reductionism appropriate for psychology?

  Because reductionism was seen to be a popular and successful approach to biological processes and phenomena in the nineteenth century it’s perhaps not surprising that it was also influential for the recently developed science of psychology. It was particularly important for the behaviourist approach, which offered an early example of reductionism in psychology.

  Pavlov, Watson and Skinner all attempted to reduce animal and human behaviour to the laws of conditioning. The behaviourists argued that reference to vague mentalistic terms such as consciousness, mind and thinking obscured the scientific truth that undoubtedly lay beneath human behaviour and instead they sought the patterns of stimulus–response units that could be described much more objectively. If all behaviour could be reduced to the same basic elements, then this meant that psychologists could conduct laboratory experiments on all human behaviours, no matter how complex they might seem to be within a wider social context. As Schultz and Schultz (2004) put it, the behaviourists wanted psychologists to be able to study behaviour in a similar way to how biologists were studying living organisms and how physicists were studying the universe: by the breaking down the complex into its component parts, whether that meant cells, atoms or stimulus–response units.

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  AQA Psychology A Level Paper Three: Issues and Debates

  • Phil Gorman(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  14. Can reductionist approaches work with human behaviour?

  15. Is holism the ultimate interactionist approach?

  16. Is holism the way forward with mental disorders?

  17. Can you provide a modern example of the holism–reductionism debate continuing?

  Glossary

  Key word	Definition
  Biological reductionism	An attempt to explain human behaviour with reference to the biological processes involved, e.g. genes, hormones, etc.
  Conditioned reactions	Responses to stimuli that are more innate but that have been learned, particularly through the process of association.
  Empathy	Being able to understand someone else’s (the client’s) feelings.
  Endocrine system	A collection of glands that produce hormones responsible for the regulation of many functions within the human body.
  Environmental (stimulus–response) reductionism	An attempt to explain human behaviour with reference to the environmental factors that impact upon it.
  fMRI	Stands for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and is a way of scanning the brain by showing the blood flow in different parts of the brain whilst performing certain activities.
  Fully functioning person	Someone who is in touch with their deepest and innermost feelings and desires.
  Genuineness	Refers to a therapist’s attempt to be authentic or honest.
  Gestalt	A movement in psychology that believed in the idea that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’.
  Gestalt laws	A set of principles created to explain the tendency to see things as a whole rather than separate elements, for example the law of closure.
  Holism	The most complex explanation that tries to look at the complete picture to explain behaviour and explore all of the factors that might influence it.
  Hormones	Chemicals released into the bloodstream that help to regulate many bodily functions, such as the metabolic rate.

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  Philosophy of Social Science

  • Alexander Rosenberg(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER NINE Holism and Antireductionism in Sociology and Psychology

  Among social scientists there is a long tradition of insisting that the distinctive subject matter of their sciences are facts that are not psychology, whether matters of prediction or interpretation. Instead, their sciences explain autonomous social facts by other social facts, and neither is reducible to more basic facts about individual people or anything else. The same type of argument is advanced by psychologists to deny the relevance of basic sciences, such as neuroscience, to its research agenda. In this chapter we examine the structurally similar arguments of antireductionist social scientists and psychologists.

  HOLISM AND ANTIREDUCTIONISM IN SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

  Not all social science is devoted to the psychological explanation of individual human action, nor to explaining human institutions as dependent on individual psychological processes. Indeed, the tradition of European philosophical anthropology examined in the last chapter holds that broad social forces operate on individual psychologies to constrain, structure, or even produce individual action. Even among those who embrace an empirical, naturalistic approach to human affairs quite different from the European tradition, there are sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and students of politics who hold that what is characteristic about social science is that it deals with a range of facts about people, which have little to do with the psychological factors explaining individual human action. The facts are about human social institutions, like families or businesses, and about large aggregations of people, like social classes or religious groups, or even about whole societies, economies, or cultures. Following a tradition dating back to Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, let us call these facts “social facts.” That social facts are not the same as the sum of the psychological factors explaining individual agents, their behavior, and its causes is crucial to the claim that special social facts exist.

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  What′s Behind the Research?

  Discovering Hidden Assumptions in the Behavioral Sciences

  • Brent D. Slife, Richard N. Williams(Authors)
  • 1995(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  In the Western intellectual tradition there has been a preference for simpler over more complex explanations for phenomena. Simplicity has been conceptualized in terms of the number of assumptions made or the number of constructs invoked (fewer is better), as well as in terms of biological and mechanical, as opposed to rational processes. This preference is expressed in contemporary behavioral sciences as reductionism. The essence of reductionistic explanation is to claim that some phenomenon (X) is “really just” something else (Y). This something else that accounts for the phenomenon X is considered to be more basic and fundamental than the phenomenon itself, and thus explains it.

  Contemporary strategies of reductive explanation have grown out of various intellectual sources, including traditional metaphysical thinking, materialism, and Enlightenment ideas characterized by mechanism, the notion of linear time, and theories of evolution. Each of these lines of thought has given rise to reductive thinking in the behavioral sciences. Explaining human phenomena in terms of metaphysical, temporal, materialistic, mechanical, or biological reduction has been an appealing strategy because it offers the illusion of simplicity. However, because of its implicit assumptions, it brings with it certain problematic implications for the meaning of human life and human beings themselves.

  Careful examination of these reductive approaches to the behavioral sciences raises questions about whether they are compelling and can be shown to be valid. At the same time, they have important implications about our human nature. A review of the dominant theories in the behavioral sciences suggests that they employ, in one form or another, all the reductive strategies described in the chapter. Postmodern theorists take a radically different perspective on the issue of reductionism, suggesting that some form of reduction is unavoidable, but that the ultimate grounding for reductive explanation is human lived experience. Postmodernists do not attempt to privilege some physical or nonphysical structure underlying lived experience, nor do they rely on changeless and unified principles. Rather, they take experience as it is lived—at face value, so to speak—with all the changing and disunified context in which it is inextricably embedded.

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  Religion and Psychology in Transition

  Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Theology

  • James W. Jones(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  To argue that social scientific re-search demonstrates that religion is only a psychological process is to ar-gue in a circle and mistake method for conclusion. Such reductionism is also predicated on an outmoded understanding of the relationship of theory and data and on a mechanistic model of nature which has been repudiated in the physical sciences. Parts, Wholes, and Hierarchies Arguing against reductionism on the basis of the necessary incomplete-ness in any theoretical account portrays the various disciplines as a series of heuristically self-contained compartments (Jones  ). Each devel-ops its own methods and theories around the core questions it seeks to answer, the particular problems it seeks to solve, and goals it wishes to achieve. Such a model emphasizes discontinuity between disciplines, ad-vocates a pluralistic and pragmatic approach to human understanding, and exemplifies a compartmentalized view of the relationship among disciplines. The various disciplines can, however, also be seen as a series of more encompassing sets, fitting within each other like larger and larger con-tainers. Natural processes at certain levels of complexity, for example, cannot be completely described in language of their component parts. Describing biological processes necessitates terms not required to ex-plain simple chemical reactions: hierarchy, organization, structure, and even information become important constructs for describing living sys-tems. The result is a hierarchy of theories, of descriptions, each more en-compassing and each introducing novel concepts. A simple analogy is the relation of letters, sentences, and a book. A book is made up of sentences, sentences are made up of words, and words are made up of letters. A book is not just a random assortment of letters. The Dilemmas of Reductionism  The selection of letters in a book is a function of the words in a book. The selection of words in a book is a function of sentences in a book.

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  To Fix or To Heal

  Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine

  • Joseph E. Davis, Ana Marta Gonzalez, Joseph E. Davis, Ana Marta Gonzalez(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  4 Reductionism has often meant those defining features of scientific medicine against which holism, in its various forms, has aligned itself.

  In popular usage the term holistic is often used by practitioners and participants to designate particular mind–body practices—such as acupuncture and healing touch; the use of natural substances, such as botanicals and probiotics; and healing systems, such as homeopathy and naturopathy—that are alternative or complementary to mainstream medicine.5 It can also refer to a larger, critical orientation that accompanies and informs the use of these practices. This orientation often has a premodern, non-Western, spiritual, and anti-bureaucratic ethos that is set against conventional “allopathic” medicine and wants to replace it. If the biomedical model amplifies the division between mind and body with an overemphasis on the somatic, holistic health practitioners often make the opposite error, granting the mind a nearly boundless power over the ailing body.

  However, our concern is with a sensibility and a set of interlinked ideas articulated within the mainstream (though certainly with influence from alternative practices) of medicine and social science. Holism, in this sense, was never a self-conscious movement; few proponents even used the term. The shared feature, expressed in many different forms, is a contextual understanding of disease causation, intervention, or practice. A systemic concern with the whole organism (including the emotional/psychological), a focus on the interconnected effects of the larger physical or social environment, and attention to population-level variation can all be characterized as holistic. So too can more synthetic ways of knowing—supplementing the narrowness of scientific analysis with other modes and disciplines of thought—and ethical concerns with the quality of human relations in the clinical encounter and wider society.6

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  Psychology and the Question of Agency

  • Jack Martin, Jeff Sugarman, Janice Thompson(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  17 Chapter Two Reductionism in Psychology THE NATURALISTIC PROJECT that attempts to explain psychological kinds (human experience, understanding, thought, and action) according to empirical regularities and causal laws, is possible only if one holds the belief that psychological phenomena can be reduced to what are thought to be more basic, constitutive phenomena amenable to the methods of natural science. Psychologists have primarily employed five reductive strat- egies: (a) biological, (b) psychometric, (c) behavioral, (d) neurophysiologi- cal, and (e) computational. Various combinations of these have been attempted as well. All of these reductive strategies, as employed in pro- grams of psychological research, attempt to remove psychological kinds from the everyday historical, sociocultural contexts that, in large part, create and maintain them. Once everyday psychological phenomena are reduced, whatever remains is placed in highly controlled, idealized labo- ratory settings and/or formal psychometric–statistical or logical systems. By the time research psychologists set to work, they no longer are dealing with human psychological activity in its usual historical, sociocultural surroundings; instead, they are dealing with reflexes, personality factors, operant classes, patterns of cerebral excitation and inhibition, semantic and procedural networks, and so forth. As we shall see in chapter 3, such language contrasts sharply with an agentic discourse of beliefs, understand- ing, reasons, purposes, choices, and actions. In commenting on the history of reductionism in the human sciences in general, Rüdiger Safranski (1998) recently has remarked: 17 18 Psychology and the Question of Agency It is astonishing how, ever since the middle of the nineteenth century . . . there has suddenly been a universal desire to make Man “small.” That is when the thought pattern of “Man is noth- ing other than ___” began to advance.

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  Rethinking Psychology

  Good Science, Bad Science, Pseudoscience

  • Brian Hughes(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Other figures more or less resorted to physiognomy, likening the verticality of the female face to that of ‘primi-tive’ races (Russett, 1989). Over the past century, scientific psychology has of course revealed much about the biological basis to complex human behaviour. And anyone who has reflected on the way drugs and brain injuries can affect behaviour and cognition will quickly appreciate the fundamental intertwining of bio-logical factors with a person’s psychological functioning. The problem of biological reductionism becomes acute when it is implied that biological factors simply override all other considerations, when the depiction of bio-logical dimensions of behaviour are oversimplified or exaggerated, when mundane biological occurrences are attributed with mystical causative influence, or when unwarranted leaps of reasoning are made from the bio-chemical and anatomical to the macro-level and sociocultural. In short, biological reductionism occurs when psychologists overstate what they know about the biological nature of psychology beyond that which can be justified by the science. Ways in which psychological concepts can be subjected to biological reductionism are plentiful. At the broadest level, biological reductionism frequently occurs when evolutionary frameworks are used to explain psy-chological phenomena. That is not to say that natural selection has nothing to do with behaviour; clearly it does. Given that humans are biological organisms, and given the intertwining of biological and psychological life, it is inevitable that many aspects of the human experience will be shaped by natural selection across time. The ability of young babies and children to acquire spoken language without specifically being trained to do so rep-resents an elaborate cognitive skill that cannot reasonably be accounted for by contingent reinforcement in their immediate environments.

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  The Matter of the Mind

  Philosophical Essays on Psychology, Neuroscience and Reduction

  • Maurice Schouten, Huib Looren de Jong, Maurice Schouten, Huib Looren de Jong, Maurice Schouten, Huib Looren de Jong(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  He argues that there is more than one ontology and more than one explanation for a phenomenon. Hence, he defends an approach which, he says, is “genuinely nonreductive” in the sense that it is neither reductive nor antireductive, but pluralistic (or naturalistic). To sum up, the dichotomy between reductionism and autonomy that we started with is a simplification. Careful conceptual work in the metaphysics of science (Gillett, Polger, Melnyk, Shapiro), in empiric-ally informed work in the philosophy of science (Clark, Richardson, Endicott, Bechtel, McCauley), and empirical case studies and laboratory work in neuroscience (Wright, Bickle, Looren de Jong & Schouten) yield the picture of many connections and, in Kant’s terminology, of passages between the many levels and domains of study of the mind/ brain. The most reductionist position is defended by John Bickle, whose strategy of confronting philosophical problems (and philosophers) with the latest data from the laboratory bench is exceptional, but yields stimulating results. Most of the other authors, however, will acknowledge that to a more or lesser degree higher-level explanations are indispensable, but not autonomous; and that psychology and neuroscience are and should be connected and perhaps integrated, but not unified along physicalist lines. 5. Gaps and Gulfs: Unity and Pluralism Recall that in this overview of the territory we departed on the assump-tion that unity is a crucial desideratum in science. As Klein and Lachièze-Rey say: “without unity as a beacon, the world, indeed human thought 22 Maurice Schouten and Huib Looren de Jong itself, would scatter into a dust of things and ideas impossible to integrate” (1999, p. vii). Such a unity of science apparently involves what Descartes once called a catena scientiarum ( Cogitationes privatae , AT 10: 215). Scientific disciplines and theories must be strung together.

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