Abstract

The term “reductionism” is used broadly for any claim that some range of phenomena can be fully assimilated to some other, apparently distinct range of phenomena. The logical positivist thesis that scientific truth could be fully analyzed into reports of immediate experience was a reductionistic thesis of great significance in the history of the philosophy of science (see logical positivism). In recent philosophy of science, “reductionism” is generally used more specifically to refer to the thesis that all scientific truth should ultimately be explicable, in principle at least, by appeal to fundamental laws governing the behavior of microphysical particles.