I do not agree with you....

This is a good twofold question.

The answer to the first question is straightforward, once we agree on the meaning of the term "reductionist".    Apparently, reductionism strongly reflects a perspective on causality.

In a reductionist framework, phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of relations between other more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena. Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it.    For more about this, see

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Reductionism.html

A good scientist will suspend judgement about causes of observed phenomena.   Instead, using the hypothesis approach, one goes about testing one's hypotheses concerning phenomena.    In that sense, a scientist would not be reductionist.

Thanks James.  A little bit of search on the term ''reductionist'' tells us that there are many meanings.  You mentioned one that science has to be.  Any scientific novelty, any new scientific model has to acheive some kind of complexity reduction.  Either subsume two or three models under a single more general one, or subsume a phenomenal domain not yet explore under a theoretical model.  In general science is a reduction process and in that sense is a reductionist process.  Why scientist should not be reductionist?  There are many meanings that can be interpreted.  You mention one: Do not assume that the theoretical reduction has succeeded and extend it outside its realm of validity.  Be suspiscious and remain open mind even after success of limited reduction.   A scientist should not take the philosophical position that because the limited success of the scientific theoretical reduction so far achieved that it is only a question of time for eventually maybe in thousand years science will almost explain all that exist.  This position is the Spinoza and Einstein position that reality is ultimately theoretical or rational.  We cannot proove nor disproove this philosophical position.  I think that this is an unproductive philosophical position for a scientist to adopt.  I do not mean that a scientist adopting it would be a bad scientist because Einstein and many other that had that position were among the best.  But you will notice that this position prevented Einstein to fully participated to the development of Quantum physics although he was a pionneer in this field.  He was productive as a critics of Quantum physics and the EPR thought experiment that was design to falsify quantum theory end up to be one of the most productive idea.  So I have to stop because I just defeated my own argument!

Regards

Dear Louis,

Definitely, you have a profound view of reductionism.    You write: Any scientific novelty, any new scientific model has to acheive some kind of complexity reduction.

I think your observation pertains more to scientific models after their initial introduction. Of course, you are correct that each new scientific model undergoes simplification, resulting in complexity reduction.    Such complexity reduction is a natural outcome of purging a complex model of any unnecessary or seeming redundant parts.

I also think you are correct in pointing out that scientists typically push away at the frontiers of their subject and do not focus on the reductionist approach. 

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

“The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn’t have been this way. We didn’t impose it on the Universe. That’s the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

Here is a lovely quote by "Edward O. Wilson":

"The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science."

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

Please, See.....

I do not agree with you....