 Holism and reductionism represent two paradigms or world views within science and philosophy that provide fundamentally different accounts as to how to best view, interpret and reason about the world around us. Reductionism places an emphasis on the constituent parts of a system, while Holism places an emphasis on the whole system. While reductionism breaks an entity down so as to reason about the entire system with reference to its elementary parts, Holism tries to understand something in reference to the whole system or environment that it's a part of. Reductionism is the practice of analysing and describing a complex phenomena in terms of the elementary parts that exist on a simpler or more fundamental level. Reductionism attempts to create a unified description of the world through reducing it to a set of elementary components from which any phenomena can be explained as some combination of these parts. The aim of reductionism is an explanation showing how higher level features of a whole system arise from elementary components and thus the higher level features of a system can be largely ignored within an enquiry allowing us to focus on the lower level parts that constitute it. Reductionism implies an assumption that all higher level phenomena can be understood as some combination of lower level phenomena. For example, a reductionist approach to interpreting a biological entity like a cell might take such an entity to be reducible to collections of physiochemical elements like atoms and molecules. It would then focus on understanding these parts and how they combine to give the higher level functions and behaviour of the whole cell instead of focusing on those higher level features of the cell itself. Equally, a reductionist approach to cognition would attempt to reduce higher level cognitive phenomena such as awareness, emotions and concepts to the basic physiochemical building blocks of the brain, neurons and synapses. The theory of methodological individualism within the social sciences would be another example of a reductionist approach in that it requires that causal accounts of social phenomena be explicable through how they result from the motives and actions of individual agents. The common theme among different reductionist positions consists above all of their emphasis that complex phenomena should be explained by statements about phenomena that are of a simpler, more basic nature. Holism refers to any approach that emphasises the whole rather than constituent parts of a system. Holistic accounts of the world would look for how an entity forms part of some larger whole and is defined by its relations and functioning within that broader system. What all holistic approaches have in common includes the principle that the whole has priority over its parts and the assumption that properties of the whole cannot be explained by the properties of its parts, which is the idea of emergence. Within this paradigm, the ultimate sources of knowledge are seen to derive not from elementary component parts but instead from reference to the system's broader context. Given that something can only be properly understood within this context, to gain a fuller understanding of something requires gaining a greater understanding of the environment or context to that system. Holism posits that a system's behaviour and properties should be viewed as a whole, not as a collection of parts. This often includes the view that systems function as holes and that their functioning cannot be fully understood solely in terms of their component parts. For example, social psychologists look at the behaviour of individuals in a social context because group behaviour like conformity cannot be fully understood by looking at the individual in isolation but instead is best understood by looking at the individual within the context of the whole social group. This property to the individual of conformity only emerges when individuals interact in a social group. Likewise, many phenomena such as the wetness of water only emerge when the two atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are combined to give water. Neither atom possesses such a characteristic in isolation and thus we can only talk about the wetness of water when looking at the component parts as a whole system. When contrasted, reductionism and holism lead to a number of fundamentally different perspectives on basic questions about causality, objectivity, structure, dynamics etc. While holism puts forward a top-down view of causality and a dynamic, process-orientated view of the world that is subjective in nature, reductionism provides a more static, bottom-up and objective perspective. The reductionist approach typically adopts an objective stance. The central tenets of objectivism are that reality exists independently of consciousness and that human beings have direct contact with reality through sensory perception. In its general sense, objectivism is the position that there is a single real world in which human actors are embedded, that these real world properties and organizations are transparent to our perception and cognition and that it is our or the scientist's job to know this objective world through empirical inquiry to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between our conceptual representation of the world and the actual objective world that exists. Holistic approaches typically hold the idea that the individual or the scientist is not a passive observer of an external universe, that there is no objective truth but that the individual is in a reciprocal participatory relationship with nature and that the observer's contribution to the process is valuable. Due to this recognition to the subjective dimension of the observer's interpretation holistic approaches are more inclined to begin by examining the subjective interpretations of the observer recognizing the need for an effective paradigm before an effective evaluation or model can be formed. This recognition that the holistic approach gives to the subjective interpretation of the observer opens the door for the idea that there may be multiple valid or at least valuable explanations for any phenomena. Thus, while reductionism is inclined to search for one right answer Holism tries to understand a phenomena by gaining as many perspectives on it as possible and then synthesizing these perspectives into a more complete understanding. Reductionism and Holism represent two fundamentally different perspectives on the nature of causality. Reductionism strongly reflects a particular conception of causality Reductionism leads to the idea of upward causation seeing higher level phenomena as being caused by lower level entities. Phenomena that can be explained fully in terms of the relations of other more fundamental phenomena are called epiphenomena. Typically within the reductionist paradigm there is an implication that the epiphenomena exert no causal effects on the fundamental phenomena that explain them. The epiphenomena are often said to be nothing but the outcome of the workings of the fundamental entities. As a result, according to this view, causation at higher levels of existence is always in some sense a derivative or epiphenomena caused by lower level interactions. Productionism then follows a strong organizational pattern of upward causation. Within the reductionist paradigm upward causation appears the only real plausible scientific explanation of phenomena. When the direction of causal influence extends from the macro level of organization down to the micro level this is termed downward causation. Polistic accounts are primarily interested in the workings of how the function and structure of an entity are defined by the broader system or whole that it is a part of. As such, it places a strong emphasis on downward causation how the whole macro level affects a downward cause on the formation of the parts. This downward causation can be understood as an inverse of the reductionist principle. The behavior, structure and functionality of the elements in the system are determined by the behavior of the whole. Here, determination moves downwards instead of upwards. One readily identifiable example of this would be the constraints and effect a society as a whole has on its individual members thus exerting a downward causation. This downward causation can be seen within societies where individuals create the culture, institutions and norms but then those institutions feed back to constrain and enable the agents in the social system so that we get a continuous dynamic between the macro and micro levels with causality flowing in both directions. The central aim of the reductionist approach is to reduce phenomena to their single lowest denominator and then define all high level phenomena in terms of these elementary parts. Thus, reductionist approaches actively strive to reduce all accounts to a single dimension defining all high level phenomena as deriving from a single lower level dimension as such reductionism can be said to be monodimensional in its structure because holistic accounts are grounded in the concept of emergence whereby new and qualitatively different phenomena and patterns emerge as we put things together it places a great emphasis on the multidimensionality to phenomena that exhibit any degree of complexity A holistic approach suggests that there are different levels of explanation and that at each level there are emergent properties that cannot be reduced to those of a lower level For example, whereas a reductionist approach may try and understand a patient's mental disorder as purely chemical imbalances in the brain prescribing drugs to affect this A holistic approach would more likely look at different physiological, cognitive and socio-cultural factors to deal with the condition at various levels and from different dimensions Holistic accounts are typically process orientated in nature whereas reductionist accounts are more focused on the static properties of elementary parts Within a reductionist scientific analysis variables in the environment are specifically kept constant This allows researchers to repeat experiments in exactly the same way and to detect stable behavior in the variables that are being observed which in turn leads to predictable outcomes A central part of the analytical approach is the use of the concept Ceteris paribus meaning all other things being equal Variables within the environment are artificially held constant to isolate and perceive the linear effect of a limited number of variables under observation Thus the use of reductionism within various domains often involves an attempt to be able to maintain variables within the environment constant so as to be able to control a given system through a limited number of variables One of the guiding rules of Holism in contrast would be Panta rea meaning everything flows The idea that everything changes as derived from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observation that one cannot step in the same river twice whereas reductionism breaks a process down into its static parts The holistic paradigm is focused on maintaining the whole process and is fundamentally concerned with how things change through the processes that act on them