Can any of my fellow philosophy lovers explain this argument in common ordinary terms? I am having a hard time understanding. When I read about both I feel that it is either or. Is there a third option to this topic? 
Reductionism is the theory that large things can be explained by what they are composed of. So alot of science has progressed through this method - or world view. Like molecules are made up of atoms which are made up of electrons,protons etc. It also means that by understanding how the small parts work you can understand how the large assemble of the parts works.
It cannot be applied to economics or sociology. Economics is not even a science, it is a joke.
Reductionism: Things can be broken down into smaller parts.
Holism: Things can be looked at as smaller parts of bigger things. Or another way might be to say that you are looking at “the whole” and not the smaller things that make up the whole.
And I guess the third option would be to assert that things aren’t interconnected either way which is probably considered by most folks to be a obviously wrong assertion.
Both Reductionism and Holism are useful although I think Holism yields the more meaningful philosophical positions. Holism = “the big picture”.
And in fact things are not really interconnected in either way. It is just a convenient way for our mind - language - logic structures to organize them. We invent the connections, they are all made up. In fact at the planck level of sizes, 10^-50 mm space and time itself is no longer valid, and our entire universe is contained inside a small particle which then contains another universe and so on recursively and forever. There is no large and small, its is so small that it becomes gigantic. Outside time - space, the concepts of contained within, or being composed of, or cause and effect do not really exist.
Would you happen to have a link to a web page that explains more about what you’re talking about? It honestly sounds absurd. Thanks.
I just make up all my own theories. They are all really cool. It doesn’t matter if they are true or false, I am past that stage. I invent my own philosophy and physics and latch on to some parts of the official views. My views are cooler. Read some of my posts, I am self referential, that is I confirm my own theories with some others always of my own making. Invent your own thoeries, don’t follow the official science like lambs.
Check out:
That’s fantastic!!! What a world you could create for yourself! I especially like your justification: “My views are cooler.” 
In my view, reductionism is not necessarily the way to go. It puts too much faith in equating small things with fundamentals. That is, it’s driven by the view that if we chop up the physical world into small enough pieces, we’ll discover that the smallest pieces will be of such a nature that they not only explain everything else that rests upon them, but that they are self-sufficient as an explanation for themselves. In other words, they need nothing smaller to explain their existence.
This is flawed in my view. There is nothing about smaller pieces of anything that could give them the ability to sustain their own existence. Whatever we discover below the level of atoms, electrons, quarks, etc. will be just as subject to the same line of questioning that lead to their discovery in the first place. We will always question their existence, what makes them the way they are, why do they behave the way they do, what brought them into existence, just as we did the macroscopic entities that they constitute.
I tend to think of scale as a dimension akin to space or time (I did partake in another thread on this issue which lead me to conclude that scale is not a dimension proper - but I still maintain that it shares many features in common). In particular, I think of scale as infinite in both directions. So there is no “smallest level”. For anything that today’s science tells us is the smallest thing in existence, we can always imagine something smaller (singularities are just an abstract construct - no such thing exists in reality). Therefore, I see no reason to assume there is a “smallest particle”. It’s quite possible that our atom smashers can keep on smashing particles, forever getting smaller and smaller ones.
Another commonality that scale has with spatial dimensions is non-directionality - that is, there is no particular direction which should be considered the “right” direction. Maybe the fundamental basis for the universe should be sought by looking at the “big picture”. Maybe if we understood what the universe was in essence, we would have an “Ah-ha!” moment at which time we would finally understand the “how” and “why” of everything else. We would understand how a particular object comes to be or why a specific entity is the way it is by appealing to the insight of what the universe really is.
Or maybe scale is just the wrong thing to be using all together. The answers to the questions we’re asking - the “how” and “why” - have been sought for along other lines besides scale. We have considered metaphysics (God explains everything) and we have considered (and still do) temporality (whatever happened before this moment explains what’s happening now). I think we aught to be looking at alternate modes of explanation like these. To me, reductionism will just lead us down an infinite road of regress.
“For the last 400 years science has advanced by reductionism… The idea is that you could understand the world, all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces would explain the whole†(John Holland)
Or so says the dictionary.
I agree. I think we progress with the more pieces we pick up and put together.
OK, no problem. Then I’ll just say that concerning your assertion that “nothing is interconnected because of Plank’s sizes” is wrong because “Plank’s sizes” is only a limitation of our subjective ability to measure things and is in no way a reflection of the objective reality of things being interconnected.
Is that valid?
In addition, I’d like to quote from one of my favorite philosophical movies “Mindwalk”. I managed to find a link to the actual script (link pasted at bottom) so I pasted the except that I was looking for below (if you have a few minutes to read it; I don’t normally like to read long posts but I hope the dramatic nature of the dialog makes it interesting).
The point of the dialog is that mechanistic (reductionist) thinking was useful for 300 years, but that that belief today can actually be harmful (literally). “Systems thinking” (holistic) is actual better in some cases.
Remember that there are three people in this dialog:
Sonia: The physicist
Jack: The presidential candidate
Thomas: The poet
Enjoy!
JACK
But Sonia! Alright, supposing that you’re right and everything is connected with everything else, like you say, still you’ve got to start somewhere don’t you? That’s the real political question here.
…Where do you start?
SONIA
By changing our way of seeing the world… You see, you’re still searching for the right piece to fix first. You don’t see that all the problems are simply fragments of one single crisis, a crisis of perception.
JACK
Oh, good. The world is coming to an end, and you say it’s a crisis of perception. I’m sorry; that’s a little abstract for me. And all of that stuff about modern medicine, all your criticisms. I mean, I may be a doctor’s son, but you have to admit that this mechanistic medicine has been pretty successful.
SONIA
Up to a point. But simply blocking the mechanism of a disease doesn’t mean healing it. It’s like in politics, it’s just shifting the problem to another sphere.
JACK
(to THOMAS)
Are you going to help me in this or are you going to leave me stranded out here in this argument by myself?
THOMAS
I’m going to leave you stranded. I’m going to leave you stranded.
JACK
(to SONIA)
OK, a person goes to a doctor today with recurring attacks of gallstones, you could say that the doctor was working from a poor perceptual model that he just concentrated on a part of the clock that wasn’t working and removed it. But the fact is the patient is out of pain; he’s feeling better,
and the clock is ticking again.This perceptual model works.
SONIA
But is everything that works good for the system?
JACK
Come on, Sonia! That’s disingenuous… and not at all useful when applied to politics, which is after all a system that is based on people…It’s the art of bringing people to agree on a certain course of action. If that course of action succeeds, the people are satisfied. If not, they’re not. It’s as simple as that. If it works, it’s good. Period.
THOMAS
Isn’t that exactly what you said why politics didn’t work anymore? That politics, you said, needed to become the art of the impossible?
JACK
Whose side are you on?
THOMAS
Hers obviously. She’s intelligent, gracious, and more attractive.
SONIA
Jack, I’d like to get back to the systems. You know, you called me dishonest. Let’s talk about that gall bladder again. Let’s say that the gall bladder’s out and the pain is gone. But what about the stress that might have brought the illness on? If that stress persists, he’ll probably get sick again. Or let’s say he had changed his nutrition much earlier and done some exercise. He may never have developed the gall stones in the first place. A little health education might have been much cheaper than the operation. A lot less painful too. -But our system doesn’t encourage prevention, it encourages intervention.
JACK
OK, you’re not disingenuous. But to blame all this on a French philosopher who’s been dead for three hundred years, isn’t that a little bit out of proportion? Maybe even a little eccentric?
SONIA
(with a swift smile)
No, not if I’m right…See my point isn’t to condemn Descartes’ thinking, it’s simply to recognize its limitations. It may have been extremely useful to perceive the world as a machine for three hundred years, but that perception today is not only inaccurate, it’s actually harmful. We need a
new vision of the world.
Interesting. So just like cause and effect has directionality, it goes from the past to the future, it resembles reductionism where the large is explained through the small. The present moment is explained by the sequence of cause and effects that lead up to this moment. So this sequence starts at the big bang and ends at the moment of “measurement” .
So time is anaolgous to size, the present can be explained, broken down, to a sequence of events each further and further down in time. Just as atoms can be broken down into pieces which are smaller and smaller in size. Alot of interesting relationships could be invented with these analogies…
From everyone’s post I gather that reductionism has been the path used in the past by many scientist and philosophers…but is it not a willful approach to exclude god from the formula? If we prefer for other reasons not to exclaim a belief in god for the source of all beginnings then what source is used? Is not the reductionist basically saying" I don’t care about the big picture which is vital to explain the same piece, I’m just going to deal with this part, right here, right now… How can a reductionist justify their approach? and for 300 years? 
Figuretively speaking… how can you examine the elephant’s footprint in the room without discussing the elephant in the room?
Is this a reference to the cosmological argument for God’s existence or the argument from design?
the argument of design of course…the god view is another beast entirely
Let me rephrase this in a way that’s consistent with what science assumes (that we can observe things, and make predictions based on these observations):
We’re in a room. The room is all that can be seen to exist. There’s a curiously shaped depression in the floor.
Science would say just that - there’s a depression in the floor and that’s all that can be shown to be true. Science could, of course, map out this depression more quantitatively, but it could never, without leaving the room or miraculously gaining knowledge, conclude that an elephant made the depression.
This is the argument against metaphysics, summed up. If only things that we can observe are considered, no God can play a part. Because the nature of the concept of a “god” is such that it transcends explanation and cause and effect, it cannot play a part in theories that explain a universe that (so far) appears to be easily translated into terms of cause and effect and scientific relations.
One of the new fads in general theories of science is fractal self-similarity - the idea that in some systems (known as complex systems) the system as a whole behaves in a way that relates to (but can’t be totally explained) by any description of the behavior of even a standardized part of it.
D@#$ you are good. =D> It took you one day to explain and win me over what my professor can’t seem to do in a semester. I wondered what god had to do with this idea. By using your theory does this mean that a reductionist is atheist or agnostic? The anti-reductionist would seem to disagree and yet the antireductionist has no proof except belief and assumption.
I guess I missed something. Isn’t there an elphant’s footprint AND an elephant in the room?
Couldn’t “science” detect both the elephant and the footprint and determine that the elephant’s foot is the same size as the “curiously shaped depression” and put the two together?
So I’m confused as to the figurative nature of this example. ](https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/uploads/default/original/2X/7/7c349bf1053f368a5729d053e1e91215f22ce66c.gif "Brick wall"){kind=small}
I believe that morgasm is using a reductionist answer to the elephant’s footprint but I hope that he will answer for himself. It is never good to assume. 