Greedy reductionism
From Exampleproblems
Greedy reductionism is a term coined by Daniel Dennett, in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, to distinguish between acceptable and erroneous forms of reductionism. Whereas reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to, greedy reductionism comes when the thing we are trying to understand is explained away instead of explained, so that we fail to gain any additional understanding of the original target. For example, we can reduce temperature to average kinetic motion without denying that temperature exists, so this is good reductionism. In contrast, when we consider the question of why clicking on a link takes us to one web site and not the other, any answer that says that it all comes down to electrons and links don't really exist anyhow is a greedy attempt to explain away the problem without solving it.
Another example of greedy reductionism is Skinner's behaviorism, which not only reduced all mental attributes, such as beliefs and feelings, to behavior, but went on to deny that anything mental exists, thus failing to answer the questions it was supposed to. Instead of being able to explain behavior in terms of things such as beliefs, it casts everything in terms of conditioning. This example is particularly relevant because Dennett himself can be categorized as a type of behaviorist, but not the extreme sort who denies what he's supposed to be explaining. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett argued that, without denying that human consciousness exists, we can understand it as coming about from the coordinated activity of many components in the brain that are themselves unconscious. In response, critics accused him of explaining away consciousness because he disputed the existence of certain conceptions of consciousness that he considered overblown and incompatible with what is physically possible. This is likely what motivated Dennett to make the greedy/good distinction in his follow-up book, to admit that reductionism can go overboard but point out that not all reductionism goes to this extreme.
The opposite extreme from greedy reductionism is throwing up your hands and denying that a reductionistic analysis of a complex system can work at all. This tactic is found in some theories that say consciousness is an emergent epiphenomenon that cannot be further reduced. Dennett's response is to call such notions mysterian.
