[Revised entry by Raphael van Riel and Robert Van Gulick on April 4, 2025.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The English verb ‘reduce’ derives from the Latin ‘reducere’, whose literal meaning ‘to bring back’, informs its metaphorical use in philosophy. If one asserts that the mental reduces to the physical, that heat reduces to kinetic molecular energy, or that one theory reduces to another theory, one implies that in some relevant sense the reduced theory can be brought back to the reducing theory, the mental can be brought back to the physical, or heat can be brought…

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