 A common conclusion drawn from these one-many relations is that the parts and molecular components of an  organism  have to be understood in terms of the organized whole in which they occur (recall Kant’s regulative principle;  Section 2).  Although biologists view the decomposition of a system into lower-level parts as reductionist (an instance of methodological reduction, see  Section 1),  they often construe the attempt to understand how the parts are organized to bring about the system-level properties as a synthetic, non-reductionist endeavor (Bechtel 2010, 2013). Paying attention to context and organismal organization is a valid methodological recommendation; however, it is less clear why this is an argument against epistemic reduction. Proponents of theory reduction, such as Nagel (1961) and Schaffner (1976), have replied that a molecular reduction can take the relations of parts and the context of molecular processes into account. For example, one can specify the relevant context as initial conditions in the molecular premises from which the higher level state is to be deduced (Frost-Arnold 2004).