How to Use reductionism in a Sentence

reductionism

noun
  • Rosenberg holds out for reductionism, and seems to me to do a pretty good job at it.
    — Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 3 Nov. 2010
  • 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
  • Yet, calling Sanoë purely a jacket brand would be a form of reductionism.
    — Stacia Datskovska, Footwear News, 28 Oct. 2025
  • 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
  • For black men such as Sepuya, that kind of reductionism hurts emotionally.
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 31 Aug. 2019
  • And, at the very least, doubt is the antidote to dogma and fanaticism and reductionism.
    — Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, 23 Mar. 2023
  • The name for this idea is reductionism—the belief that the whole can be understood by the predictable behavior of the parts.
    — Adam Frank, Discover Magazine, 12 July 2023
  • This is a very high bar to clear, and an endeavor that no opponent of reductionism has ever succeeded at.
    — Big Think, 16 Oct. 2025
  • Big stuff consists of smaller, more fundamental stuff — an idea known as reductionism.
    — Quanta Magazine, 1 Mar. 2022
  • 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
  • There are, however, ways other than reductionism to think about what’s fundamental in the universe.
    — Adam Frank, The Atlantic, 15 Dec. 2025
  • Faux also employs this type of reductionism while breezily dismissing the entirety of crypto as a massive scam.
    — Byjeff John Roberts, Fortune Crypto, 12 Sep. 2023
  • The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions.
    — Adam Frank, The Atlantic, 15 Dec. 2025
  • 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
  • Ultimately, the brain-soup technique’s central strength — its reductionism — is also its weakness.
    — Ferris Jabr, New York Times, 14 Dec. 2017
  • 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
  • Non-reductionism requires magic, not merely science.
    — Big Think, 29 Jan. 2026
  • The existence of systems that are too complex to predict with current technology is not an argument against reductionism.
    — Big Think, 16 Oct. 2025
  • Scores of scientists and philosophers would (and do) dispute this sort of hyper-materialistic reductionism.
    — Jeff Cimmino, National Review, 19 July 2017
  • But hyperbolic reductionism of this sort will be offensive to the vast majority of historians.
    — Carlos Eire, New York Times, 18 Dec. 2017
  • Albrecht’s clock ambiguity and Smolin’s critiques of string theory expose chinks in the armor of reductionism.
    — Adam Frank, Discover Magazine, 12 July 2023
  • Kruger’s epigrams differ from other forms of reductionism, including the journalistic sound bite and the political slogan.
    — Washington Post, 4 Oct. 2021
  • 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
  • Indeed, the unitary constructs of race reductionism themselves originate from historically specific sources.
    — Adolph Reed Jr., The New Republic, 17 Feb. 2021
  • This simple idea — that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena — is known as reductionism.
    — Big Think, 16 Oct. 2025
  • 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
  • Recently, many scientists and philosophers have championed the idea that reductionism can’t explain all of reality, like chemistry, biology, life, and consciousness.
    — Big Think, 16 Oct. 2025
  • 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
  • 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

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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