Irreducibility (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The principle of Irreducibility, in philosophy, has the sense that a complete account of an entity will not be possible at lower levels of explanation and which has novel properties beyond prediction and explanation. Another way to state this is that Occam's razor requires the elimination of only those entities that are unnecessary, not as many entities as could conceivably be eliminated. Lev Vygotsky provides the following illustration of the idea, in his Thought and Language: "Two essentially different modes of analysis are possible in the study of psychological structures. It seems to us that one of them is responsible for all the failures that have beset former investigators of the old problem, which we are about to tackle in our turn, and that the other is the only correct way to approach it.