"Beauty had been born, not, as we so often conceive it nowadays, as an ideal of humanity, but as measure, as the reduction of the chaos of appearances to the precision of linear symbols. Symmetry, balance, harmonic division, mated and mensurated intervals - such were its abstract characteristics." (Herbert E Read, "Icon and Idea", 1955)
"Science is the reduction of the bewildering diversity of unique events to manageable uniformity within one of a number of symbol systems, and technology is the art of using these symbol systems so as to control and organize unique events. Scientific observation is always a viewing of things through the refracting medium of a symbol system, and technological praxis is always handling of things in ways that some symbol system has dictated. Education in science and technology is essentially education on the symbol level." (Aldous L Huxley, "Essay", Daedalus, 1962)
"Whereas traditional reductionism sought to find the commonality underlying diversity in reference to a shared substance, such as material atoms, contemporary systems theory seeks to find common features in terms of shared aspects of organization." (Ervin László, "The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time", 1972)
"For any system the environment is always more complex than the system itself. No system can maintain itself by means of a point-for-point correlation with its environment, i.e., can summon enough 'requisite variety' to match its environment. So each one has to reduce environmental complexity - primarily by restricting the environment itself and perceiving it in a categorically preformed way. On the other hand, the difference of system and environment is a prerequisite for the reduction of complexity because reduction can be performed only within the system, both for the system itself and its environment." (Thomas Luckmann & Niklas Luhmann, "The Differentiation of Society", 1977)
"There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ‘holistic’ views as some sort of cure-all […] Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain [...] there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment." (Francisco Varela, "On being autonomous: The lessons of natural history for systems theory", 1977)
"Systems theory is antireductionist; it asserts that no system can be adequately understood or totally explained once it has been broken down into its component parts." (Charles Zastrow, "Introduction to Social Work and Social Welfare: Empowering People", 1993)
"In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole. In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist." (Charles François (Ed.) "International Encyclopedia of Cybernetics and Systems", 1997)
"[...] information feedback about the real world not only alters our decisions within the context of existing frames and decision rules but also feeds back to alter our mental models. As our mental models change we change the structure of our systems, creating different decision rules and new strategies. The same information, processed and interpreted by a different decision rule, now yields a different decision. Altering the structure of our systems then alters their patterns of behavior. The development of systems thinking is a double-loop learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run, static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term, dynamic view and then redesign our policies and institutions accordingly." (John D Sterman, "Business dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"Systems thinking expands the focus of the observer, whereas analytical thinking reduces it. In other words, analysis looks into things, synthesis looks out of them. This attitude of systems thinking is often called expansionism, an alternative to classic reductionism. Whereas analytical thinking concentrates on static and structural properties, systems thinking concentrates on the function and behaviour of whole systems. Analysis gives description and knowledge; systems thinking gives explanation and understanding." (Lars Skyttner, "General Systems Theory: Ideas and Applications", 2001)
"In particular, complexity examines how components of a system can through their dynamic interaction 'spontaneously' develop collective properties or patterns, such as colour, that do not seem implicit, or at least not implicit in the same way, within individual components. Complexity investigates emergent properties, certain regularities of behaviour that somehow transcend the ingredients that make them up. Complexity argues against reductionism, against reducing the whole to the parts. And in so doing it transforms scientific understanding of far-from-equilibrium structures, of irreversible times and of non-Euclidean mobile spaces. It emphasizes how positive feedback loops can exacerbate initial stresses in the system and render it unable to absorb shocks to re-establish the original equilibrium. Positive feedback occurs when a change tendency is reinforced rather than dampened clown. Very strong interactions occur between the parts of such systems, with the absence of a central hierarchical structure that unambiguously' governs' and produces outcomes. These outcomes are to be seen as both uncertain and irreversible." (John Urry, "Global Complexity", 2003)
"There exists an alternative to reductionism for studying systems. This alternative is known as holism. Holism considers systems to be more than the sum of their parts. It is of course interested in the parts and particularly the networks of relationships between the parts, but primarily in terms of how they give rise to and sustain in existence the new entity that is the whole whether it be a river system, an automobile, a philosophical system or a quality system." (Michael C Jackson, "Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Manager", 2003)
"In general [...] a dissipative structure may become unstable at a certain threshold and break down, enabling the emergence of a new structure. As the introduction of corresponding order parameters results from the elimination of a huge number of degrees of freedom, the emergence of dissipative order is combined with a drastic reduction of complexity." (Klaus Mainzer, "Thinking in Complexity: The Computational Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind", 2004)
"This reduction principle - the reduction of the behavior of a complex system to the behavior of its parts - is valid only if the level of complexity of the system is rather low." (Andrzej P Wierzbicki & Yoshiteru Nakamori, "Creative Space: Models of Creative Processes for the Knowledge Civilization Age", Studies in Computational Intelligence Vol.10, 2006)
"Mechanistic reductionism suggested that the universe, including life, were considered as 'mechanisms'. Consequently, understanding any system required the application of the mental strategy of engineering: the whole system should be reduced to its parts. Knowing the parts was thought to imply the complete understanding of the whole." (Péter Érdi, "Complexity Explained", 2008)
"Complex systems are not easily predictable, and the principles of reductionism do not bear fruit when laboring to understand them, as system behavior emerges on all levels of the system. Although they are not fully knowable, within reason there may be some prediction possible. (Andreas Tolk et al, "Epistemological Constraints When Evaluating Ontological Emergence with Computational Complex Adaptive Systems", [in Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX, Eds. Alfredo J Morales et al], 2018)
"In principle, reduction works and reductive logic does not fail, despite practical difficulty conducting reduction in complicated contexts. Careful reductive analysis reveals even convoluted, non-linear, evolved, self-organized, hierarchically complex, emergent phenomena, such as consciousness, remain open to unyielding reduction. However, among the anomalies associated with reductive logic," (J Rowan Scott, "Descartes, Gödel and Kuhn: Epiphenomenalism Defines a Limit on Reductive Logic", [in Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX, Eds. Alfredo J Morales et al], 2018)
"From a modeller’s perspective a dynamic hypothesis is a particularly important step of ‘complexity reduction’ - making sense of a messy situation in the real world. A feedback systems thinker has in mind a number of structure-behaviour pairs that give valuable clues or patterns to look for when explaining puzzling dynamics." (John Morecroft, "System Dynamics", [in "Systems Approaches to Making Change: A Practical Guide", Ed. Martin Reynolds & Sue Holwell] 2020)
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