Reductionism, Holism and Complementarity

In spite of the obvious plurality of scientific explanations on various levels of description, there still exists a bias toward theoretical monism. Neglecting the possibility to view nature from different perspectives and ignoring the fact that the decomposition of nature into parts is not God-given, traditional reductionism treats the various theories and models as, to be sure, incompletely articulated but ultimately reducible to an all-embracing fundamental theory. In the context of biology, reductionism is the view that all phenomena of life can be ultimately reduced to the laws of physics and chemistry. There are many variants of reductionism differing in the explanation of what “reduced to” should mean; for example, it may be defined as “accounted for”, “described by”, or “deduced from”. In its extreme form, reductionism denies that a concept is scientifically meaningful unless it is unambiguously defined in terms of fundamental physics.