Reductionism is the practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of 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 phenomenon can be explained as a simple combination of these parts. The aim of reductionism is an explanation showing how the higher level features of a whole system arise from the elementary parts. Thus, the higher level features of a system can be largely ignored within the inquiry, 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.
