In defense of scientific reductionism and definitions that explain nature

One of the accusations most often made against science and researchers by those who would like to diminish their importance, meaning and above all beauty, is the one that is summarized in one word: reductionism.
The followers of biodynamics, for example, argue that “scientific reductionism has concentrated the vision of agriculture as a laboratory where the variables must be reduced to the maximum”.

Homeopaths write that “A notable contribution in this direction comes from the slow diffusion of an anthropological vision which, overcoming the limited and limiting perspectives of a positivist-based reductionism, opens up to the boundless and unpredictable spaces of multidimensionality by pointing out extraordinary possibilities of investigation, experimentation and verification that they are more respectful of the real processes of growth and maturation of the person”.

Osteopaths tell us that “Unlike conventional Western allopathic medicine, analytical and reductionist, centered on the symptom, the disease, the use of pharmaceutical products designed to “silence” the annoyance and not without secondary or adverse effects, osteopathy try to understand the reason for what is happening in its entirety”.

Even The poster informs us that “This technocratic ideology, always accompanied by scientific and cultural reductionism, is extremely useless for understanding the environmental crisis that is bringing us to the edge of the abyss. Severing the connections seems to be the overriding imperativewhere the world we live in is teeming with complexity because everything is connected to everything else as happens in any living organism”.

In the presence of these and countless other attacks on science as reductionist, I believe it is good to dissolve a fundamental misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that unites all those who use the term “reductionism” in a diminutive sense, as if implicitly, that is, it unduly reduced the importance, complexity and beauty of something.
Scientific reductionism, in fact, in no way implies either a diminution, much less the dissection of a phenomenon into increasingly less significant details.

Instead, it is actually the opposite process: it is bringing the kaleidoscopic world of our observations back to a few crystalline statements, bringing together in a single simple and very broad framework the maximum number of facts that is possible. In science, that is, the etymological sense of the verb reduce is recovered, which is equivalent to the Latin reduce, bring backnot to dividing into parts or diminishing.

Thanks to this operation, moreover typical not only of science, but of philosophical thought itself, what is done is to recognize the fundamental unity of nature, or rather the manifestation in innumerable forms and processes of few, very few laws and universal fundamental constants, that is, we recognize the fact that a few universal numbers, which describe the properties of particular physical objects, or the classes of observable phenomena or even completely general facts, theoretically applicable to any object, placed in relation with the facts observed through the use logical-mathematical propositions, are able to fully describe reality.

On the contrary, pseudosciences and magical thinking use ad-hoc fragmentary explanations to justify the enormous variety of reality, and it is also for this reason that they are fallacious: every time they encounter a new phenomenon, they are forced either to give up a description/explanation rigorous, thus losing explanatory capacity, or to expand one’s own descriptive equipment by fragmenting one’s unity. Thus, the anthroposophy on which biodynamics is based cannot even discuss the functioning of the sun or the color of a butterfly’s wing without resorting to special or too vague principles, while the same chemistry that supports the use of drugs in medicine it may likewise help us understand the source of the color of a flower or the workings of storms in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The cumbersome alternatives to the scientific world view, such as the vitalism of biodynamics, homeopathy, Chinese acupuncture and other pseudosciences, are not simply worse at functioning: they are also hopelessly less satisfactory from an aesthetic point of viewcompared to a quantitative model of reality that is indeed incomplete and certainly erroneous in some of its parts, but is universal and capable of regenerating itself by using the discovery of its errors as a springboard, to return architectures that are ever wider, more radiant and more understandable than what we surrounds, precisely reducing, or bringing back, the boundless beauty of the world to a single, large and unitary representation of the fabric of reality.