Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions About Knowledge: Reductionism

During the last few decades the fundamental premises of the modern view of knowledge have been increasingly called into question. Questioning Ninteenth-Century Assumpitions about Knowledge, II: Reductionism provides an in-depth look at the debates surrounding the status of "reductionism" in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities in detailed and wide-ranging discussions among experts from across the disciplines. Whether or not there is or should be a basic opistemological stance that is different in the scences and humanities, and whether or not such a stance as exemplified by the approach to reductionism is changing, has enormous consequences for all aspects of knowledge production. Featured are an overview and subsequent discussion of this pervasive concept in the social sciences that parses reductionism into the categories of strong social constructionism and antiessentialism, social ontology and the a pathetic actor, dualisms, and individualism. Also of interest in chapters and follow up discussions are the relations between essentialism and emergentism in complex systems theory.

Richard E. Lee is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of Life and Times of Cultural Studies: The Polities and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge and the coeditor (with Immanuel Wallerstein) of Overcoming the Two Cultures: Science versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System.