Not a Four-Letter Word

Reductionism is a four-letter word, from which all manner of evils are supposed to follow—at least if you believe some of its critics. To be called a reductionist is to be slapped with a term of abuse signaling that one is a crass, unsophisticated epistemic leveler, perhaps suffering from a bad case of physics envy. It wasn’t always so. During the heyday of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science (the 1940s and 1950s), “reduction”was considered the summum bonum of a philosophical account of natural science (which meant, in practice, physics).