reductionistn.adj.

1826 Liverpool Mercury 27 Oct. 131/2 The reductionists [sc. those in favour of a reduction in rates of pilotage]..form a very small and insignificant part of the body of the commissioners.

1845 Bristol Mercury 11 Jan. 5/5 The claims of the abolitionists and reductionists [sc. those in favour of a reduction in particular taxes] approach the infinite.

1895 N. Brit. Daily Mail 5 Oct. 2/1 Neither progressive prohibitionists nor moderate reductionists [sc. those favouring a reduction in the number of licensed public houses] could afford to fight without each other's help.

1933 Hispania 16 320 The blind reductionist..will not recognize or cannot see the difference between a tax dollar that is wasted and a tax dollar that is productively invested.

1997 C. Cripps Drugs iv. 62 There are, indeed, many lessons to be learned from the ‘E’ experience, as much for harm reductionists as anybody else.

1918 E. G. Spaulding New Rationalism xlii. 433 Within the universe error is; it is a fact of some kind. Therefore, if one is a ‘reductionist’ and a monist, and his opponent is not, then must either the error of the latter find its niche in the monistic Hall of Fame, or the error of the former must be distinct and different from the truth of the latter's position and find its place in the Rogues' Gallery of pluralism.

1925 W. M. Urban in Philos. Rev. (1926) 35 114 This modern conception is supposed to rescue naturalistic evolution from its all too naïve and too enthusiastic friends, the reductionists.

1943 Mind 52 129 The behaviour field which, as a whole, is molar from the reductionist's point of view.

1960 J. Cohen Chance, Skill & Luck i. 13 It does not follow that psychology lacks the status of an independent science and must be ‘reduced’ to neurophysiology, though this is what latter-day reductionists in effect demand.

2004 Times Lit. Suppl. 11 June 3/1 He was a determinist and a reductionist, seeing in objective reality no more than the play of social and individual forces.

1931 H. R. Smart Logic of Sci. iii. 81 Is not the element of truth in most if not all of these reductionist doctrines just that of the unlimited applicability of new thought-constructions to experience?

1944 Jrnl. Philos. 41 139 Between the extreme of reductionist, ‘physically inflected’ psychologies including Watsonian behaviorism on the one hand, and the mentalistic subjectivism of the content psychologies on the other.

1964 I. L. Horowitz New Sociol. 9 It succeeds in re-tooling the ‘culture-lag’ doctrine by making it conform to its own reductionist image of society.

1977 Times Lit. Suppl. 1 Apr. 409/2 While the interpretation may be reductionist, it is a plausible one.

2001 J. Diamond C: Because Cowards get Cancer Too (new ed.) xii. 231 Teenage suicides tend to be reductionist on this point: what is the point of living at all if all the time we are hurtling towards certain death?