Antireductionism

Antireductionism is a philosophical position that stands in contrast to reductionism by advocating that not all properties of a system can be explained in terms of its constituent parts and their interactions. An extreme form of antireductionism is holism, that understanding a system can be done only as a whole. One form of antireductionism (epistemological) holds that we simply are not capable of understanding systems at the level of their most basic constituents, and so the program of reductionism must fail. The other kind of antireductionism (ontological) holds that such a complete explanation in terms of basic constituents is not possible even in principle for some systems. The ontological view is supported by some scientists as well.