ABSTRACT
Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel recently wrote a book titled Reductionism in Art and Brain Science in which he argued that reductionism – the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components – has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths. Reductionism is the idea that all of the complex and apparently disparate things we observe in the world can be explained in terms of universal principles governing their common ultimate constituents (Nagel, 1998). In a scientific sense, it is incredibly appealing to believe that complex phenomena in our social and political world can be distilled down into simple, and indeed separate, phenomena; put simply, of causes and effects, or “terrorists” and “everyone else.” The reality of the world is that it is far more complex, and underneath all of the simple processes that we think we see are the nuanced, complex processes that truly explain a phenomenon in the real world. It is then the challenge for scientists to not just understand the full complexity of the phenomena, but to be able to articulate that to the general public so that it can begin to see past the simple rules that it thinks govern behavior and appreciate the complexity of the problem at hand.
