Reductionism/holism

• Reductionism

  idea nature of complex things can be reduced to the sum of more fundamental things. This is belived to be true for objects, phenomena, explanations, theories and meanings
• Holism

  idea that living matter and reality is made up of organic or unified wholes that are greater than the simple sum of their parts
• Cracking cheese gromit

  • Wallace and gromit illustrate problem of reductionism, we know they're not real and moved bit by bit
  • story can be reduced to series of simple movements- final result of small movements
• Baking cakes- reductionism holism

  • cake made of number of ingredients, they don't look like much separate but put together in Patric way they make new qualities that none ingredients have itself
• Holistic approaches

  • You can't predict how whole system will behave on knowledge of its parts; that reductionist explanations can only play limited role in helping us understand behavior and may even prevent us from discovering some useful explanations
• application of reductionism/ holism

  behaviourism:

  behaviourists attempt to explain all learning in terms of simple associations. what looks like clever and thoughtful behaviour in animals is according to behaviourists, a series of responses learnt by trial and error.
• application of reductionism holism- medical model

  medical model of mental disorders:

  • belief complex psychological events are caused by simple chemical changes is reductionist. eg. general paresis of the insane condition in which a person suddenly develops a degenerative mental illness; however it was found to be last stage of sexually transmitted disease syphilis.
  • what if all mental disorders can be reduced to a simple answer like this?- reductionist approach says this will happen when we know more abt the brain
• baron Cohens study on autism - links with reductionism

  • by reducing explanations of autism down to single explanations such as cognitive deficit (lacking tom) psychologists can then create interventions to use with autistic adults to improve tom and mind reading. - reductionism makes psychologists job easier as can focus on 1 type of therapy. to take holistic approach they would consider range of explanations for autism and create interventions for all of these
• connections to holism

  Bandura et al. (1961) recognised that a number of factors impact on the likelihood of a child learning behaviour from a model such as sex of model, sex of child, type of behaviour, level of reinforcement, etc
• connections to reductionism

  kohlberg- only age as factor for moral development