In praise of reductionism
Suppose I have a business making clothing. I want to know how many items of what size to manufacture. If I can know the distribution of men's and women's adult heights in the U.S., I can plan how many shirts or pants to make of each size. Assume that the height data are not readily available. So I draw a sample of people, measure their heights, and calculate means, standard deviations, quartiles, and probably other measures of the distribution. I think that an anthropologist down at the U might be interested in my height data, so I head downtown. The first anthropologist I run into is a cultural anthropologist. When I show him my data, he chides me for being simplistic. How can I possibly think I have described my population of people when I have only looked at their height? We want to know so much more about people, she says. My little study is ridiculously limited and it can't help him understand people at all. It is reductionist, It is useless. Why did I bother. Then I r...