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Conservative Reduction

A conservative reduction is a reduction of a phenomena that does not deny anything that was previously believed about the phenomena being reduced. A conservative reduction is therefore additive in nature, generally filling in the details of how an observed phenomena really works "under the hood".

A famous example of a conservative reduction was the reduction of air temperature to the mean kinetic energy of gas molecules. This was a conservative reduction because nothing about the folk concept of temperature, which remains useful, was invalidated by reducing it to mean kinetic energy. Some air is still warmer than other air, opening a door on a cold day still lets the heat out, and thermometers are still a reliable measure of heat. Rather than being denied, the way that these things work was simply explained in greater detail.

References

Paul and Patricia Churchland, "Intertheoretic Reduction: A Neuroscientist's Field Guide" in On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997 (MIT Press, 1998)

Angus Menuge, Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004)

Web Resources On Conservative Reduction

Reductionism: Concepts in Complex Systems
Reductionism: Wikipedia entry

Book Resources On Conservative Reduction

Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science by Angus Menuge
Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality by Richard H. Jones
On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997 by Paul and Patricia Churchland

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