reductionism
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.10 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
4
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An approach to studying complex systems or ideas by reducing them to a set of simpler components.
Countable; Uncountable
noun
A philosophical position which holds that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. In a reductionist framework, the phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena are called "epiphenomena".
Countable; Uncountable
Etymology
Etymology tree English reduction Proto-Indo-European *-id- Proto-Indo-European *-yéti Proto-Indo-European *-idyéti Proto-Hellenic *-íd͏̌d͏̌ō Ancient Greek -ῐ́ζω (-ĭ́zō) Proto-Indo-European *-mos Proto-Indo-European *-mós Ancient Greek -μός (-mós) Ancient Greek -ισμός (-ismós)der. English -ism English reductionism From reduction + -ism.