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A person who analyses and describes a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundamental constituents.
‘a crude reductionist’
‘More conservatively, however, many reductionists reintroduced elements of composition into improvised music.’
‘In life, the impulse toward a simple stripping down to some bare truth is either delusion, hubris, or the reductionist's dust.’
‘The author makes claims for the central importance of the railway in every aspect of life without seeming a crude reductionist.’
‘He attacks the critics of postmodernism by calling them sociological reductionists.’
‘Picasso was a reductionist, interested in arriving at the essential truth of the matter.’
‘Identity theorists are reductionists; and reduction is distinct from elimination.’
‘He is a reductionist who holds that whatever real property one finds in the whole must be found proportionally in the parts.’
‘The question about the validity of the system is embedded in the debate between reductionists and system theorists.’
‘Having sat at the table alongside the immortals, hearing their words while watching their games of footsie, he is a sort of reflexive reductionist.’
‘The reductionists argued for the simplicity of tragedy; their rivals argued for the magnificent expansiveness of epic.’
adjective
derogatory
Analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundamental constituents.
‘a reductionist approach that leads to stereotyping’
‘They take the reductionist position that the fundamental building blocks of any organization are individuals, not the groups within it.’
‘The extent to which we are free, for example, may have to be revised if we accept reductionist explanations of behaviour.’
‘The advent of specific drugs joined with a more research-based, reductionist brand of medical diagnosis.’
‘The examples bear witness to the beginnings of a reductionist period for the Spanish artist, during which earlier complex works gave way to minimalism.’
‘He warns against reductionist analyses and emphasises that films should be judged by narrative criteria, as entertainment, and as stories.’
‘I do think the way the site evaluates films is a little reductionist.’
‘Where the author lets readers down is in her too often reductionist effort to have the frontier wars be the explanation of the 1692 witchcraft outbreak.’
‘As far as your opinion that a reductionist approach killed the visual arts, I would have to disagree.’
‘It sounds kind of reductionist to sum people up by their musical tastes and how they differ from yours.’
‘Reductionist science is considered bad science with politically oppressive implications.’