СВОДИМОСТЬ

Reducibility

A form of expressing the necessary connection between elements of a logical or scientific theory in general. The moods of the figures of a syllogism were reduced to moods of the first figure by Aristotelian syllogistic. In mathematical logic, expressed in the form of a deductive theory, reducibility is an operation for obtaining axioms from the respective propositions of a theory. Reducibility establishes the rational ties between the propositions of a theory which have a different degree of community. Therefore it acts as a necessary moment in the development of a theory itself.

But attempts to reduce theories, differing in their concrete nature, to one another are always doomed to failure. For example, attempts to reduce the laws of higher forms of motion to lower, of complex to simple, have proved untenable, although each higher form of movement contains the lower as a subordinate element. The desire to explain the properties and laws of more complex systems by the laws of simpler systems is a characteristic feature of the metaphysical method of thinking. This naturally does not imply denial of the relative role played by the lower forms of motion in studying the higher forms.