Holism

[4] The concept of holism can inform the methodology for a broad array of scientific fields and lifestyle practices.

[7] First, holism claims that every scientifically measurable thing, either physical or psychological, does possess a nature as a whole beyond its parts.

Smuts discussed this sense of holism in his claim that an individual's body and mind are not completely separated but instead connect and represent the holistic idea of a person.

Smuts used Pavlovian studies to argue that the inheritance of behavioral changes supports his idea of creative evolution as opposed to purely accidental development in nature.

[8][9] Smuts believed that this creative process was intrinsic within all physical systems of parts and ruled out indirect, transcendent forces.

In his words, holism is "the ultimate synthetic, ordering, organizing, regulative activity in the universe which accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it.

Professional philosophers of science and linguistics did not consider Holism and Evolution seriously upon its initial publication in 1926 and the work has received criticism for a lack of theoretical coherence.

[14] There are different conceptions of nonseparability in physics and its exploration is considered to broadly present insight into the ontological problem.

A methodological reductionist in physics might seek to explain, for example, the behavior of a liquid by examining its component molecules, atoms, ions or electrons.

A methodological holist, on the other hand, believes there is something misguided about this approach; one proponent, a condensed matter physicist, puts it: “the most important advances in this area come about by the emergence of qualitatively new concepts at the intermediate or macroscopic levels—concepts which, one hopes, will be compatible with one's information about the microscopic constituents, but which are in no sense logically dependent on it.”[16] This perspective is considered a conventional attitude among contemporary physicists.

[14] In another sense, holism is a metaphysical claim that the nature of a system is not determined by the properties of its component parts.

The linguistic perspective of meaning holism is traced back to Quine[28] but was subsequently formalized by analytic philosophers Michael Dummett, Jerry Fodor, and Ernest Lepore.

[14] In one example, contextual holists make this point simply by suggesting we often do not actually share identical inferential assumptions but instead rely on context to counter differences of inference and support communication.

"The reductionist approach has successfully identified most of the components and many of the interactions but, unfortunately, offers no convincing concepts or methods to understand how system properties emerge...the pluralism of causes and effects in biological networks is better addressed by observing, through quantitative measures, multiple components simultaneously and by rigorous data integration with mathematical models.