Reductionism vs Abstraction - What's the difference?
reductionism | abstraction |
an approach to studying complex systems or ideas by reducing them to a set of simpler components
(philosophy) Reductionism is a philosophical position which holds that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanation, theories, and meanings. Reductionism strongly reflects a certain perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, the phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called "epiphenomena". Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it. Reductionism does not preclude the existence of what might be called "emergent phenomena", but it does imply the ability to understand those phenomena completely in terms of the processes from which they are composed.
The act of abstracting, separating, withdrawing, or taking away; withdrawal; the state of being taken away.
* 1848 , , Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy :
# (euphemistic) The taking surreptitiously for one's own use part of the property of another; purloining.
# (engineering) Removal of water from a river, lake, or aquifer.
A separation from worldly objects; a recluse life, as a hermit's abstraction ; the withdrawal from one's senses.
The act of focusing on one characteristic of an object rather than the object as a whole group of characteristics; the act of separating said qualities from the object or ideas.
* W. Hamilton, in Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1860), Lecture XXXV,
The act of comparing commonality between distinct objects and organizing using those similarities; the act of generalizing characteristics; the product of said generalization.
An idea or notion of an abstract or theoretical nature.
Absence or absorption of mind; inattention to present objects; preoccupation.
(art) An abstract creation, or piece of art; qualities of artwork that are free from representational aspects.
(chemistry) A separation of volatile parts by the act of distillation.
An idea of an unrealistic or visionary nature.
The result of mentally abstracting an idea; the results of said process.
(geology) The merging of two river valleys by the larger of the two deepening and widening so much so, as to assimilate the smaller.
(computing) Any generalization technique that ignores or hides details to capture some kind of commonality between different instances for the purpose of controlling the intellectual complexity of engineered systems, particularly software systems.
(computing) Any intellectual construct produced through the technique of abstraction.
As nouns the difference between reductionism and abstraction
is that reductionism is an approach to studying complex systems or ideas by reducing them to a set of simpler components while abstraction is the act of abstracting, separating, withdrawing, or taking away; withdrawal; the state of being taken away.reductionism
English
Noun
(wikipedia reductionism)See also
* holismabstraction
English
Noun
- The cancelling of the debt would be no destruction of wealth, but a transfer of it: a wrongful abstraction of wealth from certain members of the community, for the profit of the government, or of the tax-payers.
page 474:
- Abstraction is no positive act: it is simply the negative of attention.
- Abstraction is necessary for the classification of things into genera and species.
- to fight for mere abstractions .
Antonyms
* (the act of generalization) specialization * (mentally abstracting) concretizationDerived terms
* abstractional * abstractionism * abstractionist * abstractiveExternal links
* * * *Glossary of Water Terms, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.