reductionism and holism Flashcards
limitation:fails to account for emergent properties.
E:emergent properties appear at higher levels of explanation.
E:a reductionist approach can overlook the properties that arise from the whole system (e.g., the whole person or whole social environment).In contrast, the holistic approach emphasizes the importance of considering high-level systems in their entirety. By examining these higher-level systems, the holistic approach embraces the claim that a system can have properties that cannot be detected at the level of its constituent parts.
L:therefore, a reductionist approach maybe effective at analysing the constituent elements of behaviour, but this approach may be weaker than a holistic approach as it ignores emergent properties that arise at a higher level than these constituent element
limitation of reductionist:may have weaker ecological validity than holistic research
E:reductionist research involves reducing an explanation to a simple set of variables that can be tested in an experiment.g. ascus experiment of conformity.
E:The problem here is that to test the causal relationship between a small set of variables, experimenters are forced to control for the influence of many other variables, and doing this often leads to laboratory style experiments which bear little resemblance to the messiness of the real world.
L:the advantage the reductionist approach gains from its scientific method may come at the cost of supporting research that lacks ecological validity
limitation of reductionism: oversimplifies complex phenomena
E:for example, a biological reductionist explanation of addiction might explain an addict’s motivation to use drugs in terms of the firing of certain neurons in an area of the brain that controls out motivation
E:this method offers an incomplete and unsatisfying understanding of human behaviour.
L:Therefore, the tendency of the reductionist approach to focus on constituent elements produces theories that seem overly simple compared to the holistic approach, which takes account of all relevant factors.
