The Reductionist Fallacy

The Reductionist Fallacy occurs when someone wrongly assumes that understanding or explaining a complex issue by examining only its individual parts is enough to grasp the whole. In other words, it mistakes the properties of the parts for the properties of the entire system. For example, explaining human behavior solely by chemical brain processes ignores social, emotional, and environmental factors. While analyzing parts can be helpful, this fallacy overlooks how these parts interact to produce the complexity of the whole. Recognizing this fallacy is important to avoid oversimplifying complex systems or phenomena.