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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A paper which considers Proudfoot's definition of religious reductionism, especially with reference to the difference between explanatory and descriptive reduction, and the reasons why the latter is not appropriate to an analysis of religious experience. Bibliography lists 3 sources
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: JL5_JLreduct.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
and explanatory. Proudfoot considers the latter to be acceptable in the context of analysing religious experiences and phenomena, whereas the latter is not. As Lillegard (2002) points out, the concept
of reductionism takes a whole and reduces it to its component parts: we could say, for example, that a cloud is reducible to a collection of water droplets, and that
the way in which clouds behave can be equated to the way in which collections of water droplets behave.
However, he also notes that are different types of reductionism, and that not all of these will be equally applicable to human experience
and human behaviour. Since religious and mystical experiences tend to be individual and subjective, it is particularly difficult to find a form of reductionism which is appropriate to such events.
Proudfoot looks critically at the different types of reductionism which have been applied to religious experiences. He asserts that descriptive reduction, which he does not consider acceptable when assessing religious
experience, is the misidentification of an experience. If the subject describes their own
experience in religious terms, then it is not appropriate for others to describe it in terms of a purely physical experience (noting changes in heart-rate, type of brain activity and
so on). These changes may be associated with the experience but they do not constitute its entirety. Equally, it is not acceptable to take the experience of an individual who
practises one religious faith and describe their experience in terms of another faith: Proudfoot notes that using Christian terms to categorise the experience of a Hindu would be a form
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