Abstract
An ecosystem is a composite entity of biotic and nonbiotic parts. But it is not a simple aggregation of parts, where the properties of the whole are reducible to the properties of the parts (reductionism). Rather, the parts come together in a special synergy, producing emergent properties (holism). Reductionists maintain that parts of a whole are externally related: the essence of one part is completely separate and independent from the essence of another part; and the essence of the whole is exhaustively reducible to the essences of its constituent parts and the various relations among them. Holists maintain the contrary view, that the parts of a whole are internally related, so that the essence of each is partially constituted by the properties of all the others and of the whole. Hence, the whole cannot be understood from its parts and their relations to each other alone; and conversely, the parts cannot be fully understood apart from the whole. Considered holistically, an ecosystem will have emergent properties that are not properties of its constituent parts and cannot be reduced to or explained solely in terms of them. A synthesis of both approaches is needed. An alternative explanation for why we are unable to reduce some entities to their constituent parts and their properties is that we are simply ignorant of the details. As we learn more about them the reduction will become more and more complete. Holism is thus conceived as an epistemological deficiency and not as a metaphysical reality. But this is improbable with respect to highly complex systems that exhibit the unpredictable properties of an organic whole. Acknowledgement of this is critical for being able to see (know) and appreciate (value) nature as consisting of systems within systems. And this in turn is necessary for the attainment of ecological wisdom and ecological justice.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Blitz (1992, 178) divides Reductionism, Mechanism, Emergentism, Organicism, and Holism in a first-order ranking:
Methodology
Ontology
Epistemology
Reductionism
Properties of wholes are always found among the properties of their parts
Knowledge of the parts is both necessary and sufficient for understanding the whole
Mechanism
Properties of wholes are effects of the parts and their structure
Knowledge of the kind or type of the cause is sufficient for understanding the kind or type of the effect
Emergentism
Some properties of wholes are not the properties of any of their parts
Knowledge of the parts is necessary but not sufficient for understanding the whole
Organicism
Parts cannot exist independently of a whole
Knowledge of the whole is necessary in order to understand the parts and conversely
Holism
The basic unit is the whole—the essence of a whole is sui generis; the essences of the parts are derivative
Knowledge of the parts is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding the whole
- 3.
Here Lovejoy is referring to the Scholastic maxim that there cannot be more “reality” or “perfection” in an effect than in its cause. Anselm, Hakim (1997, 222–5) and Descartes (2006, 105–10) famously used this maxim in their “ontological arguments”—as Kant (2006a, b, c, 563) would later call them—for the existence of God.
- 4.
French ecologist Bergandi (1995) questions Odum’s claims by pointing out the problems in the contention that ecosystem ecology is “reductionistic holism.” According to Bergandi, reductionism and holism are mutually exclusive, and in claiming to hybridize the two methodologies, Odum doesn’t remain observant of the ontological and epistemological presuppositions of holism. “Reductionistic holism” is a chimera, which obfuscates the need for a truly holistic ecology.
- 5.
Simberloff’s paper is significant in the history of the philosophy of ecology. Nonetheless his characterizations are problematic if not inaccurate. American philosopher Marjorie Grene excoriates Simberloff for renouncing “standards of accuracy that, at least in the layman’s view, ought to govern their discourse as scientists” (1980, 41). Simberloff, for example, equates essentialism-idealism with the ancient Greeks (omitting Fichte, Hegel, and Berkeley), Greek thought with idealism (omitting Democritus), and idealism with determinism (this is not true, since Hobbes was a materialist determinist).
References
Ahl, Valerie, and T.F.H. Allen. 1996. Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary, and Epistemology. New York: Columbia University Press.
Allen, T.F.H., and Thomas W. Hoekstra. 1992. Toward a Unified Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press.
Allen, T.F.H., and Thomas B. Starr. 1982. Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bergandi, Donato. 1995. ‘Reductionist Holism:’ An Oxymoron or a Philosophical Chimera of E. P. Odum’s Systems Ecology? Ludus Vitalis: Journal of Philosophy and Life Sciences 3: 145–178.
Blitz, David. 1992. Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality. Boston: Kluwer.
Clements, Frederic E. 1936. Nature and Structure of the Climax. Journal of Ecology 24: 252–284.
Clements, Frederic E. 1916. Plant Succession: An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation. The Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication No. 242. Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Institution.
Descartes, René. 1973. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Descartes, René. 1990. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Descartes, René. 2006. Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Diamond, Jared M. 1973. Distributional Ecology of New Guinea Birds. Science 179 (February 23): 767.
Edson, Michael M., Theodore C. Foin, and Charles M. Knapp. 1981. ‘Emergent Properties’ and Ecological Research. American Naturalist 118: 593–596.
Elton, Charles S. 1930. Animal Ecology and Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Flew, Anthony (ed.). 1984. A Dictionary of Philosophy, revised 2nd edn. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Golley, Frank B. 1972. Energy Flux in Ecosystems. In Ecosystem Structure and Function, ed. J.A. Wiens. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.
Golley, Frank B. 1993. A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More Than the Sum of the Parts. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Guthrie, W.K.C. 1962. A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Haeckel, Ernst H. 1866a. Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, vol. 1. Berlin: Druck und Verlag Von Georg Reimer.
Haeckel, Ernst H. 1866b. Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, vol. 2. Berlin: Verlag Von Georg Reimer.
Hagen, Joel B. 1989. Research Perspectives and the Anomalous Status of Modern Ecology. Biology and Philosophy 4: 433–455.
Hakim, Albert B. (ed.). 1997. Historical Introduction to Philosophy, 3rd edn. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Hempel, Carl, and Paul Oppenheim. 1948. Studies in the Logic of Explanation. Philosophy of Science 15: 135–175.
Hutchinson, GEvelyn. 1978. An Introduction to Population Ecology. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jones, Clive G., and J.M. Lawton (eds.). 1994. Linking Species and Ecosystems. New York: Chapman & Hall.
Kant, Immanuel. 2006a. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2006b. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2006c. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kirk, G.S., J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield. 2006. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Koestler, Arthur. 1968. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: The MacMillan Company.
Laszlo, Ervin. 1971. Systems Philosophy. Main Currents in Modern Thought 28: 55–60.
Leeming, David. 2005. The Oxford Companion to World Mythology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1991. Monadology, trans. Nicholas Rescher. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press.
Leopold, Aldo. 1939. A Biotic View of the Land. The Council Ring 1 (12) (November 13): 1. From University of Wisconsin—Madison Archive, Leopold Papers 9/25/10-6 box 1.
Levin, Simon A. (ed.). 2009. The Princeton Guide to Ecology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Levins, Richard, and Richard C. Lewontin. 1980. Dialectics and Reductionism in Ecology. Synthese 43: 47–78.
Lewontin, Richard C. 1983. The Corpse in the Elevator. The New York Review of Books 29 (January 20): 34–37.
Liddell, Henry G., and Robert Scott. 1968. A Greek-English Lexicon. Two Volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lindeman, Raymond L. 1942. The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology. Ecology 23: 399–418.
Loehle, Craig, and Joseph H.K. Pechmann. 1988. Evolution: The Missing Ingredient in Systems Ecology. American Naturalist 132: 884–899.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1927. The Meanings of ‘Emergence’ and its Modes. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, ed. Edgar S. Brightman, 20–33. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
Maddox, Brenda. 2003. The Double Helix and the Wronged Heroine. Nature 421: 407.
McKeon, Richard (ed.). 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House.
Melsen, Andrew G.M. van. 1972. Atomism. In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1, ed. Paul Edwards, 193–198. New York: Macmillan and Free Press.
Merchant, Carolyn. 1990. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
Morgan, Michael L. (ed.). 2002. Spinoza: The Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Naess, Arne. 1981. The Primacy of the Whole. In Holism and Ecology: Working Papers for the Project on Goals, Processes and Indicators of Development (GPID), 1–10. Japan: The United Nations University.
Nagel, Ernest. 1961. The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Newton, Isaac. 1999. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. I, trans. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press.
O’Neill, Robert V., D.L. DeAngelis, J.B. Waide, and T.F.H. Allen. 1986. A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems. In Monographs in Population Biology 23. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Odum, Howard T. 1957. Trophic Structure and Productivity of Silver Springs, Florida. Ecological Monographs 27: 55–112.
Odum, Eugene P. 1962. Relationships Between Structure and Function in Ecosystems. Japanese Journal of Ecology 12: 108–118.
Odum, Eugene P. 1986. Introductory Review: Perspectives of Ecosystem Theory and Application. In Ecosystem Theory and Application, ed. Nicholas Polunin, 1–11. New York: John Wiley.
Patten, Bernard C. 1959. An Introduction to the Cybernetics of the Ecosystem: The Trophic Dynamic Aspect. Ecology 40: 221–231.
Pickett, Stewart T.A., Jurek Kolasa, and Clive G. Jones. 1994. Ecological Understanding: The Nature of Theory and the Theory of Nature. San Diego: Academic Press.
Pimm, Stuart L. 1991. The Balance of Nature? Ecological Issues in the Conservation of Species and Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Polanyi, Michael. 1968. Life’s Irreducible Structure. Science 160: 1308–1312.
Rorty, Richard. 1972. Relations, Internal and External. In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, 125–133. New York: Macmillan and Free Press.
Salt, George W. 1979. “A Comment on the Use of the Term ‘Emergent Properties’”. The American Naturalist 113 (1): 145–148.
Schaffner, Kenneth F. 1969. The Watson-Crick Model and Reductionism. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 20: 325–348.
Scheiner, Samuel M., André J. Hudson, and Mark A. VanderMeulen. 1993. An Epistemology for Ecology. Ecological Society of America Bulletin 74: 17–21.
Schoener, Thomas W. 1986. Mechanistic Approaches to Ecology: A New Reductionism? American Zoologist 26: 81–106.
Simberloff, Daniel S. 1980. A Succession of Paradigms in Ecology: Essentialism to Materialism and Probabilism. Synthese 43: 3–39.
Simon, H.J. 1962. The Architecture of Complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106 (6) (December).
Smuts, Jan Christian. 1926. Holism and Evolution. New York: Macmillan.
Steinbeck, John. 1968. The Log From the Sea of Cortez. New York: The Viking Press.
Tansley, Arthur G. 1935. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms. Ecology 16: 284–307.
Taylor, Christopher W. (trans. and ed.). 1999. The Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus: Fragments. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
Watson, James, and Francis Crick. 1953a. Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Nature 171: 737.
Watson, James, and Francis Crick. 1953b. Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Nature 171: 964.
Whittaker, Robert A., Simon A. Levin, and Richard B. Root. 1973. Niche, Habitat and Ecotope. The American Naturalist 107: 321–338.
Whittaker, Robert A., and Simon A. Levin. 1975. Introduction. In Niche: Theory and Application. Benchmark Papers in Ecology, vol. 3, 1–8. Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania: Dowden, Hutchinson, and Ross.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Keller, D.R. (2019). Reductionism, Holism, and Hierarchy Theory. In: Ecology and Justice—Citizenship in Biotic Communities. Studies in Global Justice, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11636-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11636-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-11634-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-11636-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)