This chapter looks specifically at neural circuits, assemblies of neurons that influence sensory, motor and cognitive functions. I discuss the conventional criteria for understanding these circuits, which are reductionist in their approach, and highlight various caveats in experimental and conceptual approaches that are routinely followed. I also consider the use of motifs, arrangements of component parts of a circuit that serve specific functions like electronic components. I follow others in highlighting the utility of appealing to motifs, but again highlight caveats of these motifs that mean we cannot assume their presence or the function when we know they are present. I finish by discussing aspects that have been identified over the last few decades that may add to the aspects we need to study, including plasticity, glial cells, variability and ephaptic signals.

This chapter considers reductionism, a major aspect of neuroscience research. I consider reductionist claims that we can only understand nervous systems from knowledge of their component parts. I then consider reductionist approaches and what we have learnt by following them, highlighting that a complete reductionist account of any nervous system region hasn’t been and is probably impossible to achieve. I then discuss decomposable hierarchical and non-decomposable heterarchical systems, and how relational aspects suggest we cannot understand the latter systems from cataloguing their individual components. I then discuss two effects that have received little attention despite being known for decades – volume transmission and ephaptic signalling – that highlight the need to consider component parts in relation to the whole system. I finish by discussing non-reductionist views, equipotentiality, cybernetics, the holonomic brain and embodied cognition, highlighting, as many have in the past, that debating between reductionist and non-reductionist approaches is a false dichotomy.

This chapter discusses the broader role and impact of analytics science in improving various aspects of society. It introduces what the book is about, and what the reader should expect to learn from reading this book. It also discusses the analytics revolution in the private and public sector, and introduces a key element of the book — insight-driven problem solving — by highlighting its vital role in addressing various societal problems.

What are the categories: fundamental entities or concepts? Suárez answers this question by rejecting strong realism as well as conceptualism. On his view, the distinction of ten categories marks a conceptual distinction that is grounded in reality, but without there being a one-to-one relation between concepts and entities. Rather, the distinction is grounded in different things (res) as well as modes (modi) and in combinations of these two building blocks of reality. The chapter examines this grounding relation by first analyzing Suárez’s account of things and modes and the way they are related to each other. It then focuses on the categories of substance and quality and explains in what sense the concepts of substance and quality are grounded in things and modes. Finally, it argues that Suárez subscribes to a distinctive form of reductionism that differs from the standard nominalist approach to the categories.

There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics, and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

● Darwin invented the concept of group selection to explain the evolution of traits that lead individuals to improve the fitnesses of others at a fitness cost to self. Such traits are now called “altruistic.” ● Understanding Simpson’s paradox is key to understanding how natural selection can cause altruism to increase in frequency in a meta-population. ● A criterion is derived for when altruism is fitter than selfishness in a meta-population in which there are groups of size 2. The relevance of correlation and genealogical relatedness to the evolution of altruism is discussed, as is the question of whether reciprocal altruism is really a form of selfishness. ● The concepts of cultural group selection and species selection require further refinements in how group fitness needs to be understood. ● In addition to individual selection and group selection, there is a third unit of selection – intragenomic conflict. Meiotic drive is a classic example. ● The reductionist thesis that group and individual selection reduce to selection on genes is criticized, as are conventionalist theses that assert that it is a matter of convenience, not biological fact, whether group selection occurs in a population.

The life sciences and social sciences typically study “complex adaptive systems:” nonlinear, self-organizing, adaptive, multilevel, multicomponent systems in which dense interconnections between elements produce irreducible/emergent systems effects. Systems and their components are partially (in)separable: they can be fully understood neither solely in terms of their parts (some outcomes are emergent) nor solely in terms of the whole (the character of the parts is essential to the nature of the whole). Important implications of a complex adaptive systems perspective for IR include a new view of international systems and their structures; a distinctive understanding of social continuity and social change; new perspectives on levels, theory, and explanation; new tools for comparative analysis; renewed attention to hierarchy; and a distinctive understanding of globalization.

There is a connection between the habits of thinking in science, economics and diplomacy that are hindering our response to climate change. Western science since the Enlightenment has built its success on reductionism. This has left us less good than we need to be at thinking holistically, and at understanding the potential for systemic change in our environment, economy, and international relations. New ways of thinking can take generations to spread through society and displace their predecessors. In our present crisis, we must accelerate this process deliberately – we cannot afford to wait.

This chapter exposes the received dyadic model of communication and then critically analyzes the presumptions of the model. This reductive model, which views communication as evolving from a basic unit of face-to-face dialogue between two people, has dominated understanding of communication from ancient dialectic to today’s speech act theory, conversation analysis, and argumentation theory – the disciplines discussed in the chapter. While the dyadic reduction has a long, important history in theorizing argumentation and communication – a history that is briefly recounted, going back to the dialectical roots of argumentation theory – the principle of reduction becomes unjustified reductionism that bypasses polylogical realities of argumentation and communication.

Chapter 8 presents the main positions in economics and in the social sciences regarding the agent/structure problem, and explores some contributions that can be made from artificial economics. First, it presents and discusses the individualist/reductionist, structuralist/holistic, and intermediate positions, regarding the agent/structure problem. Then presents simple artificial economics examples of the generation of endogenous preferences, agents' behavioral changes derived from their economic interaction, and of the demographic effects of the introduction of a market institution into an artificial economy.

The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is a pioneering institution in the field of climate modeling. Its founding director, Joseph Smagorinsky, was a member of the Princeton Meteorology Group. He hired a Japanese scientist, Syukuro Manabe, who formulated a one-dimensional model of climate, known as the radiative–convective model, that was able to calculate the amplifying climate feedback due to water vapor. This model provided one of the first reliable estimates of global warming. Manabe worked with other scientists to build three-dimensional climate models, including the first model that coupled an atmospheric model to an ocean model. The concepts of reductionism and emergentism, which provide the philosophical context for these scientific developments, are introduced.

Our practices of pursuing the truth and engaging in ethical or existential commitments, analyzed from a pragmatist perspective in the previous chapters, are inherently normative. This chapter considers the transcendental question concerning the very possibility of normativity - that is, the possibility of our engaging in the normative practices we do engage in, including practices of truth-seeking presupposing individual ethical sincerity - from the point of view of a pragmatist transcendental philosophy (as developed in the earlier chapters). It is suggested that such a transcendental question about normativity belongs to philosophical anthropology, as it examines the most basic aspects of the human condition. It is argued that no contingent and naturalizable matters of fact, such as psychological acts of recognition, can adequately ground the possibility of normativity in the transcendental sense. A pragmatist commitment to sincerity thus also entails a commitment to irreducible (but not therefore mystical or supernatural) normativity. A pragmatic and transcendental form of humanism emerges as the only way of making sense of normativity in our lives and practices.

The chapter discusses the impact of materialistic and reductionist perspectives on peace analysis and examines how they affect understanding human nature.

The chapter discusses the impact of materialistic and reductionist perspectives on peace analysis and examines how they affect understanding human nature.