Reductionism

Reductionism, in philosophy, a view that asserts that entities of a given kind are identical to, or are collections or combinations of, entities of another (often simpler or more basic) kind or that expressions denoting such entities are definable in terms of expressions denoting other entities. Thus, the ideas that physical bodies are collections of atoms or that a given mental state (e.g., one person’s belief that snow is white) is identical to a particular...