Are there flaws to reductionism?

Answer 1

Most religious people are critical of reductionism, as there is little place for God in a world in that is just the sum of its parts. Additionally Complex Systems theory is devoted to studying systems were reductionism fails to address important issues.

Answer 2

Yes and no.
No because as I interpret it reductionism is a conceptual tool that is useful in natural philosophy. That is, when we are confronted with a huge, seemingly overwhelming problem, we use "reductionism" that is, we kind of have faith that, no matter how complex the system is, it must be a finite system that can be "reduced" to priciples. The power of modern science stems from our ability to do just this, and from our success at arriving at fundamental laws.
In all practical aspects of your life and engineering, yes reductionism is true and a valuable tool for making sense of what appears to be chaos.
However, that said, reductionism cannot be applied as a philosophical interpretation of how the universe works. For centuries it was speculated that reductionism could be applied to the entire universe, however we now know from quantum theory that it basically does not hold at the most fundamental level.
I will try to explain briefly in simple terms. In order for me to reduce the phenomenon that I perceive into a simple explanation, I would have to be able to show how the elements that compose the phenomenon all experience some common law. However, it wouldn't make sense to reduce a phenomenon to a set of fundamental laws that differs from the set of fundamental laws that the phenomenon experiences. So basically, in physics, it has been shown that you cannot explain the properties of fundamental particals with the same laws that you explain everyday physics with, thus you cannot reduce the one into the other, and reductionism fails.
However, this does not mean that it isn't true, it just means that we can't do it right now, and some day it will probably be figured out. This is what string theory essentially attempts to do. A theory that could do it would be called "a theory of everything" and people are looking for it. Incidentally, Einstein spent about twenty years of his life trying to do this with a "grand unification theory" but never suceeded.

(also, to hardcore science people, I know I am simplifying things, but bear with me.)

Answer 3

Well, it is true that all biology can be reduced to physics, BUT it is also true that you get a lot more traction, a lot more predictive and explanatory power with much shorter theories etc., if you use concepts of biology, rather than just the underlying physical laws.

So that's one example where there is tangible "value added" by a "higher level", where you would lose that value by sticking to some straw-man hypothetical reductionism so strict that it rejected even biology, in favor of only physics.

But nobody really does that, so as I said, it's just a "straw man" argument (diverting attention from the real issues, like the overwhelming explanatory power of the scientific method in general, by worrying about something that no one does, that never happens).

Answer 4

Not quite sure what you mean...

Reductionism = describing reality from a limited (reduced) perspective.

An example is studying mankind only from a biological perspective. This is a flawed approach because man is more than just a biological creature; he is also social, moral, psychological, religious, etc.