**6.2 An epistemological choice and its consequences**

Due to another source of malfunction, the scientific reductionism operation must be re-examined. In this case, the methodological reductionism will be considered differently from its ordinary meaning: we will consider it as a methodological approach aimed at condensing a real situation to reduce it to its most fundamental components. This type of operation, also used for a quite different purpose, has been called "eidetic reduction" by the phenomenologists, to shift, using their terminology, from the "existence" of things to their "essence".

Thus, a natural situation (i.e. outside the laboratory) is an instantiation surrounded by a "clutter" of temporal or circumstantial particularisms, which prove secondary for those wanting to isolate *general* information to be used for theorising and modelling. Moreover, this reduction also takes a material form when it allows researchers to build the device mentioned above in order to select from the flow the information which must be kept and then test the information which seems important, in particular that used to satisfy the objectivity.
