great quote

Reductionism, roughly speaking, is the view that
everything in this world is really something else, and
that the something else is always in the end
unedifying. So lucidly formulated, one can see that
this is a luminously true and certain idea. The hope
that it could ever bee denied or refuted is absurd. One
day, the Second Law of Thermodynamics may seem
obsolete; but reductionism will stand for ever. It is
important to understand why it is so indubitably true. It
is rooted ... not in the nature of things, but in our ideal
of explanation. Genuine explanation, not the grunts
which pass for such in “common sense”, means
subsumption under a structure or schema made up of
neutral, impersonal elements. In this sense,
explanation is always “dehumanising”, and
inescapably so.
— Ernest Gellner [11, p. 107]

via Cosma's class slides (see Feb 12)