Reductionism
Etymology
From Latin "reducere," "to lead back." The term for this explanatory strategy is modern, but the impulse is old — the ancient atomists already sought to reduce all change to particles rearranging. It became a defining ambition of the sciences: explain the whole by leading it back to its parts.
noun · /rih-DUK-shuh-niz-um/
The approach of explaining a complex thing entirely in terms of its simpler parts and their interactions.
What it names
A handle for a powerful but contested strategy — understanding minds through neurons, societies through individuals, life through chemistry — and for the worry that something is lost in the translation.
Example
Explaining love purely as a hit of dopamine struck her as reductionism — accurate about the mechanism, silent about the meaning.
Related idea
Holism is the counterweight, insisting that some properties belong only to the whole and vanish when you break it into parts.