The Bentham Horizon
A structural blindness to reductionism
Bentham's philisophical approach was full-on reductionism He broke complicated problems/concepts into their constiutent parts. He reasoned with concrete instantiations not abstractions.
This approach assume a reductionist model of the world.
A danger is that emergent features are ingored, they are veiled beyond Bentham's Horizon. "A man with clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist;" - JS Mill
In HowToKnowAPerson David Brooks makes this explicit with conversations. They happen on two levels the the official – represented by the workds spoken – falls within the Benthams Horizon and the actual – the flow of underlying emotions – which falls outside.
Effective Field Theory is a theory that encodes its own Bentham Horizon