How to Use reductionism in a Sentence

reductionism

noun
Definition of reductionismnext
  • Such reductionism has its charms, and bears some resemblance to the truth.
    — Carlos Eire, New York Times, 18 Dec. 2017
  • In a slew of recent papers, researchers have thrown reductionism to the wind.
    — Quanta Magazine, 1 Mar. 2022
  • To some extent this is building a case for pessimism about the power of reductionism in smoking out causal chains.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 7 Oct. 2012
  • The reductionism of the studies raises questions about whether place cells and grid cells fire in the same way when animals find themselves outside the lab.
    — May-Britt Moser, Scientific American, 1 Jan. 2016
  • For black men such as Sepuya, that kind of reductionism hurts emotionally.
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 31 Aug. 2019
  • That danger of reductionism is certainly worth bearing in mind when considering how the two recent votes in Europe turned out.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 6 Dec. 2016
  • Big stuff consists of smaller, more fundamental stuff — an idea known as reductionism.
    — Quanta Magazine, 1 Mar. 2022
  • Ultimately, the brain-soup technique’s central strength — its reductionism — is also its weakness.
    — Ferris Jabr, New York Times, 14 Dec. 2017
  • The author covers the debates that raged in the 18th and 19th centuries between mechanists, who understood nature as a machine reducible to its discrete parts (reductionism), and vitalists who argued that this sum did not suffice to explain life.
    — Siri Hustvedt, Washington Post, 24 Oct. 2022
  • Also, few people have strong feelings about non-gaussianities or neutrinos, but many people have strong feelings about reductionism.
    — Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 22 Apr. 2011
  • His interest in complexity and his aversion to reductionism led him to help found the Santa Fe Institute, with its concern for interdisciplinary work.
    — Martin Weil, Washington Post, 1 Apr. 2020
  • Scores of scientists and philosophers would (and do) dispute this sort of hyper-materialistic reductionism.
    — Jeff Cimmino, National Review, 19 July 2017
  • Kruger’s epigrams differ from other forms of reductionism, including the journalistic sound bite and the political slogan.
    — Washington Post, 4 Oct. 2021
  • But hyperbolic reductionism of this sort will be offensive to the vast majority of historians.
    — Carlos Eire, New York Times, 18 Dec. 2017
  • That is one of the most intellectually disturbing features of the irrationalist race reductionism of our own historical moment.
    — Adolph Reed Jr., The New Republic, 8 Dec. 2020
  • The strategy to confine the outbreak in the U.S. was based on biomedical reductionism, which reduces infectious diseases to their biological, chemical, and physical aspects.
    — Judith D. Auerbach and Andrew D. Forsyth, STAT, 10 Mar. 2022
  • My banquet table was full of particle physicists and cosmologists -- pretty much the most sympathetic audience for reductionism one can possibly imagine.
    — Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 21 Apr. 2011
  • Passages like this one, which directly contradict their characterization of the book’s alleged determinism, reductionism, and essentialism, are easy to find!
    — Jessica Riskin, The New York Review of Books, 21 Apr. 2022
  • Race reductionism is also fundamentally corrosive to more focused efforts to reckon with this new era of inequality, thanks to its constitutional failure to recognize change and the workings of historical processes, both on and among black people.
    — Adolph Reed Jr., The New Republic, 17 Feb. 2021
  • But Barzun’s short anatomy of Marx and Marxism, quietly devastating, is permanently worth reading for its clear understanding and lucid explanation of the self-contradictory and damaging character of Marxism and all forms of reductionism.
    — M. D. Aeschliman, National Review, 30 May 2021
  • Indeed, the unitary constructs of race reductionism themselves originate from historically specific sources.
    — Adolph Reed Jr., The New Republic, 17 Feb. 2021
  • Between these two poles lie stereotyping and reductionism: Recently, a Washington Post article about a large Florida retirement community highlighted different responses among older people to the outbreak.
    — Louise Aronson, The Atlantic, 28 Mar. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'reductionism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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