III . ALTERNATIVES TO REDUCTIONISM
The emergentism, the individualism and the holism arethe three main alternatives to reductionism.
1) Emergentism:
The emergence based on the idea of an organization of the world according to increasing complexity. In this context, the emergence means the process of formation of the upper level of organization from the previous.
Is the aggregation of the components that is the utility of a phenomenon: Emergence implies the formation of intractable complex entities. These entities are constitutive of the world and they are different from their elemental constituents by specific properties. The facts reported these complex entities do not exist thanks to constituents, but thanks to all emerging. What is factually
…show more content…
This approach is opposed to holism, that individuals of the properties do not understand without using the properties of the set to which they belong (down).
Only individuals are relevant factors to understand the social groups because everything coming from them it is normal that everything returns to them:
The term was created by Joseph Schumpeter in 1908 in order to distinguish political individualism and methodological individualism. It was taken up and illustrated especially by economists Mises and Hayek, as well as by the epistemologist Karl Popper. This is Max Weber who introduced the social sciences. In France, it is focused in particular by sociologist Raymond Boudon.
Methodological individualism is the idea, consistent with the nominalist tradition that social groups are metaphors that exist only in the human mind and have no substance other than that of the individuals that compose them. Lend some attributes of individuals (motivation, a will, a possibility for autonomous action) is a
…show more content…
According to its author, holism is "the tendency in nature to form sets that are greater than the sum of their parts, through creative evolution." Holism is therefore defined broadly by the thought that tends to explain a phenomenon as an indivisible whole, the sum of its parts not enough to define it. Therefore, thought is holistic in opposition to the reductionist thinking tends to explain a phenomenon by dividing it into parts. There