Despite decades of clinical, sociopolitical, and research efforts, progress in understanding treating mental health problems remains disappointing. I discuss two barriers that have contributed to a problematic oversimplification illness. The first is diagnostic literalism, mistaking (complex within-person processes) for the diagnoses by which they are classified (clinically useful idealizations...

Scientists and philosophers have long wrestled with the problem of how we understand and make sense of our world. There are both descriptive and prescriptive approaches to understanding our world. On the descriptive side, theories of cognition, perception and thinking describe how we humans organize stimuli and make sense out of them. On the prescriptive side, there are two approaches to making...

1. Holism in biology 1.1 Reductionism, Mechanism, and Individualism 1.2 Vitalism 1.3 Emergentism 1.4 Examples: Physiology 1.5 Examples: Ecology 1.6 Examples: Evolutionary Biology 1.7 Examples: Genetics 1.8 Recurring Themes 2. Holism in physics 2.1 Holism in space–time theories 2.2 Holism in quantum physics 3. Holism in the social sciences 3.1 What is social holism? 3.2 Two types of social holis...

Macroeconomic theories picture the economy as a phenomenon tractable by their analysis and thus manageable macroeconomic policies guided this analysis. This approach has withstood recurrent policy failures, competing several changes of paradigms, from Keynesianism to monetarism, because development economics discipline been entangled with demand policymakers receive clear prescriptions expert c...

Local reductionism purports to defend a middle ground in the debate about the epistemic status of testimony-based beliefs. It does so by acknowledging the practical ineliminability of testimony as a source of knowledge, while insisting that such an acknowledgment need not entail a default-acceptance view, according to which there exists an irreducible warrant for accepting testimony. The presen...