Both Pinker and Lehrer agree that reductionalism isn’t the perfect system to understand all of the world around us. In Lehrer’s publication “The future of science … is art?” Lehrer remarks that “The novelist and the painter and the poet embrace those ephemeral aspects of the mind that cannot be reduced, or dissected, or translated into the activity of an acronym.” which is basically saying that you need an artistic thinker or way of thought to reach certain truths, especially about the mind, that a reductionalist approach could never achieve. Pinker brings his own explanation of why reductionalism isn’t the be all end all in his publication “science is not your enemy” where he explains the ridiculousness of using reductionalism as a master key by saying “No sane thinker would try to explain World War 1 in the language of physics, chemistry, and biology as opposed to the more perspicuous language of the perceptions and goals of leaders in 1914 Europe”. This quote illustrates the ridiculousness of trying to explain things as a sum of their fundamental parts as an example of how unrealistic and inefficient it would be to explain the cause for a war with the fundamental laws of nature as opposed to the political climate of the time. Both Pinker and Lehrer concur that reductionalism is an idea that we can’t rely on as much as many people think they can and that we should instead take a more wholistic approach to some problems.
Finding truth from science is a long and difficult process due to the disconnect between what we perceive and are likely to believe and what is true in the universe. Steven Pinker weighs in on this issue by saying “The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and superstitions.”. In this quote he says that by nature the laws of nature are things hidden from the perceiving methods we as humans have evolved especially for survival and that there is a lot of things in our nature that we have to overcome in able to find truth in science. For example one truth in nature that wasn’t easily detectable to us as humans was the nature of light. The nature of light for one wasn’t obvious because what we perceive as light is only a small fraction of the wavelengths of light that exist and other forms of light like radio waves and gamma waves still aren’t thought of as “light” to many laypeople even is places where higher education is readily available. The nature of light as both a wave and a particle has baffled us for a long time and is still a hard concept for a lot of people to grasp due to the human mind not being designed to think in that way. Many in the science fields including Pinker can attest to how difficult it can be to overcome the disconnect between the reality of nature and the subjective nature of us as humans.
