Reductionism has been described as one of the most abused terms in the philosophical lexicon. A brief Google search for the term reveals a number of definitions (see Box 1), but it is the one which pops up first which causes the most trouble.
The first definition in Box 1 describes reductionism as ‘the practice of analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundamental constituents’, adding ‘especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation’.
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