Reductive vs Reductionism - What's the difference?
reductive | reductionism |
Causing the physical reduction or diminution of something.
(chemistry, metallurgy, biology) That reduces a substance etc. to a more simple or basic form.
*1848 , F Knapp, Chemical Technology; Or, Chemistry Applied to the Arts and to Manufactures :
*:On the relative reductive powers of different classes of American coals, as demonstrated by the experiments with oxide of lead.
*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-03
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*1847 , John Johnson, The theological works of the rev. John Johnson :
*:But then beside the primary and direct sense of the text, the ancients commonly supposed that there was a reductive or anagogical meaning, in which it might be taken.
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.
As an adjective reductive
is pertaining to the reduction of a decree etc.; rescissory.As a noun reductionism is
an approach to studying complex systems or ideas by reducing them to a set of simpler components.reductive
English
Adjective
(en adjective)citation, passage=It is likely that the long evolutionary trajectory of Mycoplasma went from a reductive autotroph to oxidative heterotroph to a cell-wall–defective degenerate parasite. This evolutionary trajectory assumes the simplicity to complexity route of biogenesis, a point of view that is not universally accepted.}}