Developmental systems theory, by contrast, assumes that the process/data distinction is at best misleading and at worst completely false, and that while it may be helpful for very specific pragmatic or theoretical reasons to treat a structure now as a process and now as a datum, there is always a risk (to which reductionists routinely succumb) that this methodological convenience will be promoted into an ontological conclusion.[4] In fact, for the proponents of DST, either all structures are both process and data, depending on context, or even more radically, no structure is either.