The principle of Irreducibility, in philosophy, has the sense that a complete account of an will not be possible at lowerlevels of explanation and which has novel properties beyond prediction and explanation. Another way to state this is that Occam's razor requires the elimination of only those entities that are unnecessary, not as many entities as could conceivably be eliminated. Lev Vygotsky provides the following illustration of the idea, in his Thought and Language: In other words: to conserve the properties under investigation, it is necessary to remain within a certain level of complexity. Irreducibility is most often deployed in defence of the reality of human subjectivityand/orfree will, against those who treat such things as folk psychology, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland. In “Life's Irreducible Structure”, Micheal Polanyi argues that higher-order sciences such as biology and other chemical processes can not be explained by the fundamentalist perspective. Indeed, machines and the humans that make them fall into "boundary conditions" that produce phenomena that itself can not be reduced further. He writes
The lowest level is the production of a voice; the second, the utterance of words; the third, the joining of words that make sentences; the fourth, the working of sentences into a style; the fifth, and the highest, the composition of the text. The principles of each level operate under the control of the next-higher level. The voice you produce is shaped into words by a vocabulary; a given vocabulary is shaped into sentences in accordance with a grammar; and the sentences are fitted into a style, which in turn is made to convey the ideas of the composition. Thus each level is subject to dual control: control in accordance with the laws that apply to its elements in themselves, and control in accordance with the laws of the powers that control the comprehensive entity formed by these elements
It is worth noting that Reductionism has not been ruled out as an explanation of these tipping-point, emergent behaviors.
