6 Heuristics in the search for truth

The point is that there is no necessity to prejudge this decision for every case, neither to always say that alternative types of knowledge are worthless, despite the importance of the problem nor to say that it is never worth abandoning a problem because of the type of knowledge that is likely to be gained about it. I call these the extreme reductionist and extreme holist positions respectively.

To hold to the extreme reductionist position in a practical sense, one must surely claim that no problem is so much more important than other more susceptible problems to be worth swapping the sort of analytic knowledge that results from reductionist approaches for other types of knowledge. This can be a result of one of several subsidiary claims:

1. that all problems are practically susceptible - this would amount to denying any practical limitations upon ourselves at all;

2. that there are always a near indefinite supply of equally important problems - denying any real difference in the importance of problems, regardless of circumstance;

3. or that alternative forms of knowledge are always effectively worthless - presumably including the reductionist thesis itself!

These would both be extreme positions indeed! I know of no one that holds them in these forms. The rest of us fall somewhere in between in practice: we accept that there are some worthwhile problems where the reductionist technique works well and we also accept that there are problem domains where the chances of a reductionist technique working are so remote and the problem so important that we would value other forms of knowledge about it.