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The word "reductionism" is a dirty word. This is so not only because it is an "ism" word. As such, reductionism, or rather special reductionism, is easily defined as the belief in the possibility of reducing something to something else or as the advocacy of a programme to reduce something to something else. General reductionism, then, is the positive attitude towards reductions independent of the reduction partners. Mechanicism was the belief that all of physics could be reduced to mechanics, and logicism was the belief that all of mathematics could be reduced to logic. In both cases, it turned out that the corresponding programmes were impracticable, and today we no longer believe in them. Nonetheless, the work done on them showed that reductionist programmes are a kind of enterprise that scientists like to embark on. Regardless of the successes of special reduction programmes general reductionism seems rational because it fulfills an ideal of science with its theoretical economy and systematic unity and, as we all know, besides failures there have been successes in this field. One great and undeniable success was the unification of electrostatics, magnetostatics and optics in classical electrodynamics. A case like this shows that at least in physics, the subject allows reductions and that general reductionism is rational in this sense too.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-78685-3_9

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