Reductionist Framework Research Articles

Analogical Dialectics in Religious Language: Beyond Literal/Metaphorical Reductionism

This paper investigates the developmental trajectory of the debate concerning the nature of religious language, particularly the contrast between its literal and metaphorical dimensions, situating it within the broader context of linguistic, philosophical, and theological scholarship. Drawing on contemporary research, it offers a critical evaluation of three major approaches, with a detailed analysis of one in particular. The first two approaches, literalism and metaphoricism, are critiqued for their reductionist frameworks, which fundamentally erode the multifaceted nature of this discourse. The third approach, while avoiding these reductionist pitfalls, still calls for further clarification of the mechanisms underlying the interplay between these elements. Through conceptual analysis and grammatical examination, it demonstrates that this proposal, which posits a dynamic interaction—where neither dimension is subordinate to the other, but rather, they paradoxically coexist—yields a more accurate account. The findings suggest that this dialectical approach surpasses the conventional treatment of the literal–metaphorical nexus, proposing that religious language is not only communicative and comprehensible but also an evolving process in which grammatical perplexity fosters semantic depth and intellectual insight.

Settler Mimicry: Colonization and Decolonization through Imitation

Abstract This article explores the dynamics of settler mimicry in Israel—Palestine and its manifestations in the visual arts. It probes the operation of mimicry as a colonial strategy but also emphasizes its decolonial potential. Although imitation of the Palestinian natives enables Israeli settlers to annex the territory, this article suggests that mimicry can be delinked from its colonial registers and transform the settlers’ worldview. This analysis seeks to expand the insights of Patrick Wolfe, who saw the elimination of the natives as the central feature of settler colonialism. By highlighting instances in which the settler mimics the native, this article challenges his reductionist framework, which pins colonial projects to their materialist objectives. Whereas exploitation colonialism uses the colony’s resources, Wolfe contends, settler colonialism is geared toward the seizure of land, and hence toward physical and ideological elimination of the native. This article, on the other hand, emphasizes the complexity of settler colonialism and foregrounds the tension between the cultural apparatuses of elimination and mimicry. While imitation facilitates the indigenization of settlers, it also highlights the presence of natives. This internal tension renders the operation of settler colonialism ambiguous and thus can be utilized to decolonize Zionism.

A reductionist paradigm for high-throughput behavioural fingerprinting in Drosophila melanogaster

Understanding how the brain encodes behaviour is the ultimate goal of neuroscience and the ability to objectively and reproducibly describe and quantify behaviour is a necessary milestone on this path. Recent technological progresses in machine learning and computational power have boosted the development and adoption of systems leveraging on high-resolution video recording to track an animal pose and describe behaviour in all four dimensions. However, the high temporal and spatial resolution that these systems offer must come as a compromise with their throughput and accessibility. Here, we describe coccinella, an open-source reductionist framework combining high-throughput analysis of behaviour using real-time tracking on a distributed mesh of microcomputers (ethoscopes) with resource-lean statistical learning (HCTSA/Catch22). Coccinella is a reductionist system, yet outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives when exploring the pharmacobehaviour in Drosophila melanogaster.

A reductionist paradigm for high-throughput behavioural fingerprinting in Drosophila melanogaster.

Understanding how the brain encodes behaviour is the ultimate goal of neuroscience and the ability to objectively and reproducibly describe and quantify behaviour is a necessary milestone on this path. Recent technological progresses in machine learning and computational power have boosted the development and adoption of systems leveraging on high-resolution video recording to track an animal pose and describe behaviour in all four dimensions. However, the high temporal and spatial resolution that these systems offer must come as a compromise with their throughput and accessibility. Here, we describe coccinella, an open-source reductionist framework combining high-throughput analysis of behaviour using real-time tracking on a distributed mesh of microcomputers (ethoscopes) with resource-lean statistical learning (HCTSA/Catch22). Coccinella is a reductionist system, yet outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives when exploring the pharmacobehaviour in Drosophila melanogaster.

The epistemic harms of direct-to-consumer genetic tests.

In this paper, I provide an epistemic evaluation of the harms that result from the widespread marketing of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests. While genetic tests are a valuable accessory diagnostic tool when ordered by a medical practitioner, there are different implications when they are sold directly to consumers. I aim to show that there are both epistemic and non-epistemic harms associated with the widespread commoditization of DTC genetic tests. I argue that the epistemic harms produced by DTC genetic tests have been disregarded in discussions on the topic. Drawing on the notion of contributory epistemic injustices, I highlight two pertinent epistemic harms: (1) a failure to uptake an individual's articulations about their identity and (2) the presiding reductionist framework dismisses useful hermeneutical resources. I then propose ways to mitigate these harms.

High Resolution Forest Masking for Seasonal Monitoring with a Regionalized and Colourimetrically Assisted Chorologic Typology

Comparisons of recent global forest products at higher resolutions that are only available annually have shown major disagreements among forested areas in highly fragmented landscapes. A holistic reductionist framework and colourimetry were applied to create a chorologic typology of environmental indicators to map forest extent with an emphasis on large-scale performance, interpretability/communication, and spatial–temporal scalability. Interpretation keys were created to identify forest and non-forest features, and a set of candidate tree cover indices were developed and compared with a decision matrix of prescribed criteria. The candidate indices were intentionally limited to those applying only the visible and NIR bands to obtain the highest possible resolution and be compatible with commonly available multispectral satellites and higher resolution sensors, including aerial and potentially UAV/drone sensors. A new High-Resolution Tree Cover Index (HRTCI) in combination with the Green band was selected as the best index based on scores from the decision matrix. To further improve the performance of the indices, the chorologic typology included two insolation indices, a water index and a NIR surface saturation index, to exclude any remaining spectrally similar but unrelated land cover features such as agriculture, water, and built-up features using a process of elimination. The approach was applied to the four seasons across a wide range of ecosystems in south-eastern Australia, with and without regionalisation, to identify which season produces the most accurate results for each ecoregion and to assess the potential for mitigating the spatial–temporal scaling effects of the Modifiable Spatio-Temporal Unit Problem. Autumn was found to be the most effective season, yielding overall accuracies of 94.19% for the full extent, 95.79% for the temperate zone, and 95.71% for the arid zone. It produced the greatest spatial agreement between two recognised global products, the GEDI forest heights extent and the ESA WorldCover Tree cover class. The performance, transparency, and scalability of the approach should provide the basis for a framework for globally relatable forest monitoring.

Online writing instruction: Understanding university EFL instructors’ beliefs and practices as a complex system

With ongoing debates about the nature and constituents of effective online writing instruction, little is known about the beliefs and practices of online writing instructors. Most studies conducted on language teachers’ beliefs focused primarily on examining the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices based on static views, which are represented as a simplified linear or dual relationship. Complexity theory (CT) goes beyond this reductionist framework by understanding not only the components of teachers’ beliefs and practice systems but also how these components interact and mutually inform each other, creating new entities. Guided by CT perspectives, this article reports and analysis data from a multiple-case study on two experienced Saudi university English as a foreign language (EFL) writing instructors’ beliefs and practices concerning online writing instruction (OWI). Data collection included three sources: semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis. The study findings revealed that, first, the belief systems of the two instructors incorporated various interrelated and interactive beliefs and sub-beliefs in three main areas: online writing, OWI, and online writing assessment and feedback giving; second, the complex dynamic interactions between the diverse constituents of both instructors’ beliefs and practice systems played an influential role in determining whether instructors were ready to engage with and adapt pedagogical practices for OWI. The overall findings revealed two distinct belief systems within the two cases concerning engagement with OWI: one humanistic-oriented and the other structural-oriented. The study proposes a series of pedagogical and professional best practices relevant to online writing instruction.

Perspective: Acknowledging complexity to advance the understanding of developmental coordination disorder.

Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental disorder known for primary symptoms of motor learning and execution difficulties. Recent research has consistently suggested DCD symptoms span broadly beyond motor difficulties, yet a majority of research and practice approaches the investigation, diagnosis, and treatment of DCD with a reductionist framework. Therefore, this paper suggests the paradigm of complexity theory as a means for better conceptualization, assessment, and treatment of DCD. First, the perspective of complexity theory and its relevance to DCD is described. Then, examples from recent research which attempt to acknowledge and capture the complex nature of DCD are highlighted. Finally, suggestions for considering and measuring complexity of DCD in future research and practice are provided. Overall, the perspective of complexity can propel the research forward and improve the understanding of DCD relevant to assessment and treatment. The complexity paradigm is highly relevant to describing the evolving and multidimensional picture of DCD, understanding heterogeneous symptom profiles, making connections to interconnected secondary symptoms, and beyond.

Bridging the Divide between Reductionism and the Neurodiversity Movement.

While Autism Spectrum Disorder as a label invites the idea of the heterogeneity of autism, within research we often adopt reductionist frameworks which are antithetical to heterogeneous presentations of autism. The neurodiversity movement provides insight into the vastness of the autistic experience and therefore might inform how we should restructure our research questions. Inviting sociocultural concepts of neurodiversity into the lab might better structure research to benefit the autistic community.

Remembering Professional Commitments: Trusting in Teachers

In England statutory expectations for literacy education place little emphasis on contemporary modes and media of communication and, as such, are out of step with contemporary life. We explore how open-ended, collaborative pedagogies can provide rich contexts for authentic everyday communication even in the context of such reductionist curriculum and assessment frameworks. This leads us to claim that the success of such approaches depends on the enthusiasm, experience and creativity of teachers and that remembering longstanding professional commitments in language and literacy teaching is at least as important as rethinking the curriculum when advocating for literacy provision more suited to current times.

Is there a “g-neuron”? Establishing a systematic link between general intelligence (g) and the von Economo neuron

The construct of general intelligence (g) is one of psychology’s most replicated and predictively useful constructs. Although research indicates that g is a highly heritable trait, deeply rooted in brain physiology, to date neither a strong biological correlate nor a comprehensive explanatory model involving neuronal mechanisms have been established. In this article I aim to do so by hypothesising that the von Economo neuron (VEN), a unique nerve cell thus far implicated in social cognition and interoception, may in fact represent a central biological constituent of g. After presenting supportive evidence from neuroscience, psychiatry/neurology, clinical gerontology, and comparative psychology, an integrated reductionist framework is outlined, which reaches from the level of cognitive theory to the level of single neurons. Based thereon, it is concluded that the VENs might contribute to individual differences in g by rapidly inducing the coherence of neuronal oscillations within a functionally invariant parieto-frontal network underlying higher-order cognition, thereby facilitating mental efficiency.

An analytical reductionist framework to separate the effects of climate change and human activities on variation in water use efficiency

Ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE) is a key indicator that depicts the carbon-water coupling relationship in terrestrial ecosystems. Separating the effects of climate change and human activities to the variation in WUE are essential for water resources and ecosystem management, especially for fragile ecosystems such as the Tibetan Plateau (TP). In this study, we introduced an analytical framework that combined the attribution approach with the elastic coefficient separation method to assess the impact of climate change and human activities on WUE variation in the TP from 1982 to 2015. The results are the following: (1) the multiyear mean annual WUE over the TP was 0.65 g C·kg−1 H2O and had a slightly increasing trend with a slope of 0.004 g C·kg−1 H2O yr−1 with about 87% of the vegetated area showed increasing trend. (2) WUE was positively correlated with temperature, precipitation and air pressure. The northwest TP tends to be a water-limited condition, while the thermal stress is spatially universal in the TP, climate warming and wetting promoted the gross primary productivity (GPP) and WUE enhancement in the TP. (3) WUE was more sensitive to GPP, and variation in WUE was mainly contributed by GPP. Climate change and human activities tend to cause more variations in GPP rather than evapotranspiration (ET), but great differences exist for different regions and vegetation types. (4) There was a good consistency between the WUE variation calculated by the framework and the actual WUE variation (R2 = 0.95). Climate change dominated the increase of WUE in the TP with a contribution rate of 79.8%, while human activities tend to reduce WUE (−20.2%). Ecological projects played a positive role in the ecological restoration of the TP, but there may be other human activities, which caused ecological degradation, that may need more attention in future ecological protections.

3DFR: A Swift 3D Feature Reductionist Framework for Scene Independent Change Detection

In this paper we propose an end-to-end swift 3D feature reductionist framework (3DFR) for scene independent change detection. The 3DFR framework consists of three feature streams: a swift 3D feature reductionist stream (AvFeat), a contemporary feature stream (ConFeat) and a temporal median feature map. These multilateral foreground/background features are further refined through an encoder-decoder network. As a result, the proposed framework not only detects temporal changes but also learns high-level appearance features. Thus, it incorporates the object semantics for effective change detection. Furthermore, the proposed framework is validated through a scene independent evaluation scheme in order to demonstrate the robustness and generalization capability of the network. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on the benchmark CDnet 2014 dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed 3DFR network outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

Esperienza del dolore, autodeterminazione e progettualità formativa

A fronte degli attuali scenari di significato in cui il tradizionale dualismo mente/corpo, filtrato nell’impianto riduzionistico della medicina moderna, si traduce nei modelli e nelle pratiche della medicina altamente tecnologizzata della contemporaneita, l’oggettivazione del malato e della sua sofferenza espone quest'ultimo alla espropriazione della esperienza di se, nella complessita del proprio essere persona incarnata. Un approccio critico e creativo all'immaginario che fa da sfondo integratore a tale espropriazione non puo che essere finalita primaria di una progettualita pedagogica che voglia promuovere pensiero e personalita riflessive e autodeterminantesi, in grado di esperire e condividere le comuni istanze di comprensione, compassione, partecipazione, relazione, solidarieta e aiuto

Reductionism in Peirce’s sign classifications and its remedy

Abstract Attempts to explain Peirce’s various classifications of signs have been a preoccupation of many Peirce scholars. Opinions are mixed about the sense, coherence, and fruitfulness of Peirce’s various versions, particularly the latter ones. I argue here that it is not a fruitful enterprise, even if sense could be made of them. Although Peirce makes his motivations for the classification of the sciences fairly explicit, it’s hard to find Peirce’s reasons for sign classification. More importantly, I try to make the case that such classifications are premised on a reductionist framework of semiosis that is contrary to the irreducible triadic character of signs that Peirce otherwise espouses. The reductionism is the result of Peirce’s use of certain models for his sign classifications, in particular, Mendeleev’s periodic table. I suggest that the remedy for the reductionism is to re-emphasize the processual and functional view of semiosis, rather than to focus on particular classes of signs. Corresponding to the three triadic conditions of semiosis, I argue that signs function to inform, represent or refer, and interpret, and that understanding these three function and how they interrelate may prove to be a more fruitful approach to sign analysis than sign classification.

Complexity Theory: An Overview with Potential Applications for the Social Sciences

Systems theory has been challenged in the recent literature due to its perceived disconnection from today’s research and practice demands. Moving away from the reductionist frameworks and the complicated domain predominated by known unknowns and order, a call is being made to the social sciences to begin adopting complexity theory and newer connectionist methods that better address complexity and open social systems. Scholars and scholar-practitioners will continue to find the need to apply complexity theory as wicked problems become more prevalent in the social sciences. This paper differentiates between general systems theory (GST) and complexity theory, as well as identifies advantages for the social sciences in incorporating complexity theory as a formal theory. Complexity theory is expanded upon and identified as providing a new perspective and a new method of theorizing that can be practiced by disciplines within the social sciences. These additions could better position the social sciences to address the complexity associated with advancing technology, globalization, intricate markets, cultural change, and the myriad of challenges and opportunities to come.

On String Languages Generated by Spiking Neural P Systems With Structural Plasticity.

Spiking neural P systems (SNP systems) are parallel and non-deterministic models of computation, inspired by the neural system of the brain. A variant of SNP systems known as SNP systems with structural plasticity (SNPSP systems) includes the feature of adding or removing synapses among neurons. This feature is inspired by plasticity from neuroscience during cognition and learning. Despite the reductionist framework of SNP and SNPSP systems, such as brain-like systems are capable of computational universality. In particular, we use SNPSP systems in this paper to compute some classes of languages from the Chomsky hierarchy: FIN, REG, and RE. The computations of such classes continue a research direction established in the previous paper. We also emphasize the (dis)advantages of synapse plasticity in the neural system, compared with existing features of SNP systems, when generating languages.

How can systems engineering inform the methods of programme evaluation in health professions education?

We evaluate programmes in health professions education (HPE) to determine their effectiveness and value. Programme evaluation has evolved from use of reductionist frameworks to those addressing the complex interactions between programme factors. Researchers in HPE have recently suggested a 'holistic programme evaluation' aiming to better describe and understand the implications of 'emergent processes and outcomes'. We propose a programme evaluation framework informed by principles and tools from systems engineering. Systems engineers conceptualise complexity and emergent elements in unique ways that may complement and extend contemporary programme evaluations in HPE. We demonstrate how the abstract decomposition space (ADS), an engineering knowledge elicitation tool, provides the foundation for a systems engineering informed programme evaluation designed to capture both planned and emergent programme elements. We translate the ADS tool to use education-oriented language, and describe how evaluators can use it to create a programme-specific ADS through iterative refinement. We provide a conceptualisation of emergent elements and an equationthat evaluators can use to identify the emergent elements in their programme. Using our framework, evaluators can analyse programmes not as isolated units with planned processes and planned outcomes, but as unfolding, complex interactive systems that will exhibit emergent processes and emergent outcomes. Subsequent analysis of these emergent elements will inform the evaluator as they seek to optimise and improve the programme. Our proposed systems engineering informed programme evaluation framework provides principles and tools for analysing the implications of planned and emergent elements, as well as their potential interactions. We acknowledge that our framework is preliminary and will require application and constant refinement. We suggest that our framework will also advance our understanding of the construct of 'emergence' in HPE research.

The recurrent architecture of tumour initiation, progression and drug sensitivity.

Recent studies across multiple tumour types are starting to reveal a recurrent regulatory architecture in which genomic alterations cluster upstream of functional master regulator (MR) proteins, the aberrant activity of which is both necessary and sufficient to maintain tumour cell state. These proteins form small, hyperconnected and autoregulated modules (termed tumour checkpoints) that are increasingly emerging as optimal biomarkers and therapeutic targets. Crucially, as their activity is mostly dysregulated in a post-translational manner, rather than by mutations in their corresponding genes or by differential expression, the identification of MR proteins by conventional methods is challenging. In this Opinion article, we discuss novel methods for the systematic analysis of MR proteins and of the modular regulatory architecture they implement, including their use as a valuable reductionist framework to study the genetic heterogeneity of human disease and to drive key translational applications.

Beyond insulation and isolation: Towards an attuning approach to noise in hospitals

Most research on the acoustic environment in the modern Western hospital identifies raised noise levels as the main causal explanation for ranking noise as a critical stressor for patients, relatives and staff. Therefore, the most widely used strategies to tackle the problem in practice are insulation and isolation strategies to reduce measurable and perceptual noise levels. However, these strategies do not actively support the need to feel like an integral part of the shared hospital environment, which is a key element in creating healing environments, according to the paradigm of Evidence-Based Design and Healing Architecture. This article suggests that the gap in contemporary research is intimately linked to a reductionist framework underlying the field, which is incapable of accommodating the multisensory and atmospheric conditions amplifying the experience of noise. This article argues that an attuning approach should be included in the field to help bridge the gap by offering active ways of attuning to the shared environment.