 Proponents of reduction have responded in different ways. Some have suggested more flexible and liberal interpretations of reduction (Wimsatt 1976; Schaffner 1993; Dizadji-Bahmani et al. 2010), to ensure that the term ‘reduction’ still serves a purpose in describing actual scientific practice. A case in point is Schaffner’s suggestion (Schaffner 2006&amp;2012) that we should reconsider the relevance of merely partial reductions or of scientific explanations, broadly construed, that are reductionist in spirit, despite the fact that they do not comply with more traditional standards of full-fledged theory-reductions (see also Winther 2009).