Concept
Greedy reductionism
Overview
Greedy reductionism, identified by Daniel Dennett, in his 1995 book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is a kind of erroneous reductionism. Whereas "good" reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to (for example, its parts and their interactions), greedy reductionism occurs when "in their eagerness for a bargain, in their zeal to explain too much too fast, scientists and philosophers ... underestimate the complexities, trying to skip whole layers or levels of theory in their rush to fasten everything securely and neatly to the foundation". Using the terminology of "cranes" (legitimate, mechanistic explanations) and "skyhooks" (essentially, fake—e.g. supernaturalistic—explanations) built up earlier in the chapter, Dennett recapitulates his initial definition of the term in the chapter summary on p. 83: "Good reductionists suppose that all Design can be explained without skyhooks; greedy reductionists suppose it can all be explained without cranes."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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We must therefore have managed to extract resemblances from nature, which enable us to anticipate the future. Thus we must, consciously or unconsciously, have made use of the law of causality. Moreover, the more sharply the idea of efficient causality is defined in our mind, the more it takes the form of a _mechanical_ causality. And this scheme, in its turn, is the more mathematical according as it expresses a more…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
States what Greedy reductionism is.
'Construction': cf. _Werke,_ ii. 38. 'Instead of its own internal life and spontaneous movement, such a simple mode (as subject, object, cause, substance, &c.) has expression given to it by perception (here = sense-consciousness) on some superficial analogy: and this external and empty application of the formula is called "Construction." The procedure shares the qualities of all such formalism.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Greedy reductionism is.
For his fundamental principle is, we see, that the greatest happiness of all concerned is the _right_ and proper _end_ of human action. He applies the word ‘right,’ therefore, to the end, as such, not only to the means which are conducive to it; and, that being so, right can no longer be defined as ‘conducive to the general happiness,’ without involving the fallacy in question. For now it is obvious that the…
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
States what Greedy reductionism is.
Related ideas
- Operant conditioning
- Consciousness Explained
- Radical behaviorism
- Unconscious mind
- B. F. Skinner
- Reductionism
- Behaviorism
- Consciousness
- Colin McGinn
- MIT Press
- Daniel Dennett
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea
- Emergent materialism
- Owen Flanagan
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of science.