Methodological Individualism and Reductionism

My mandate in this chapter is to write about reductionism in the social sciences. Given this task my focus is on how reductionism plays out in actual social research. This does not mean that I am not going to discuss reductionism in the philosophy of the social sciences. On my naturalist Quinean view , philosophy of social science and social science are continuous in a strong sense. Arguments in the philosophy of social science ultimately have to be tied to empirical social science; empirical social science in turn often invokes many philosophical arguments.

2019

This special issue of COSMOS + TAXIS is devoted to the non-reductionist variant of methodological individualism and analyses its nature and heuristic power from both an historical and methodological standpoint. It opposes the dominant assumption that social scientists need to get rid of the individualist tradition and develop alternative approaches because of the devastating arguments provided against reductionism by philosophy and systems theory. A basic assumption is that the tendency to equate methodological individualism and reductionism is both historically and logically untenable and that, as a consequence, arguments against the latter do not undermine the former.

The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 1998

I defend the truth of the principle of methodological individualism in the social sciences. I do so by criticizing mistaken ideas about the relation between individual people and social entities held by earlier defenders of the principle. I argue, first, that social science is committed to the intentional stance; the domain of social science, therefore, coincides with the domain of intentionally described human action. Second, I argue that social entitites are theoretical terms, but quite different from the entities used in the natural sciences to explain our empirical evidence. Social entities (such as institutions) are conventional and open-ended constructions, the applications of which is a matter of judgment, not of discovery. The terms in which these social entities are constructed are the beliefs, expectations and desires, and the corresponding actions of individual people. The relation between the social and the individual 'levels' differs fundamentally from that betw...

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2020

The aim of this paper is argue that methodological individualism is inadequate because at least some social phenomena are best understood as systems, and parts of systems, that involve more than individuals and their attitudes. In particular, I will argue that there is an interdependence between the material, the cultural, and the psychological in social systems, and this interdependence is crucial for many forms of social explanation. Moreover, recognizing the interdependence between different parts of social systems is important for understanding social critique and the potential of social activism. An individualist social ontology places tremendous emphasis on the power of “collective intentionality” to constitute the social world. But our powers are limited by the material conditions, the complexity and fragmentation of societies, our embodiment, our ignorance, and the accidental bad effects of good intentions (not to mention the bad intentions). To understand societies, we must take all this into account. Understanding the multiple factors – material, cultural, historical, psychological – affecting our terms of coordination is necessary for critique, and for our efforts to promote social justice. My hope is to provide a framework within which we can better understand and critique the social world.

The British Journal of Sociology, 1968

Atlantic Economic Journal, 2022

This paper explains the role of methodological individualism as a methodology for the social sciences by briefly discussing its forerunners in economics and sociology, especially in the works of Carl Menger and Max Weber, followed by some comments on Karl Popper’s and other critical rationalists’ contributions as well as rational choice theories. Some recent arguments against methodological rationalism are then provided, including counterarguments, mainly based on exemplary work by economists and sociologists. This paper proposes a scheme for analyses using (weak) methodological individualism, in particular, arguing that evolutionary approaches to the explanation of economic and other social phenomena that accord with methodological individualism suggest that it is a successful and progressive methodology for economics and sociology.

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND ECONOMICSMICS No.29 March 2023, 2023

This paper is part of an attempt toward elucidating the potential for bridging any 'chasm' between social systems theory and methodological individualism or action theory. This paper focuses attention on methodological controversies in economics, in that these controversies preceded those in sociology, and, above all, in that economics is the most powerful source (and destination) of individualism. The author maintains that atomism should find some positive use in sociology, as it involves an attempt to relate the relationships between individuals in a group to those between that group and other groups. This paper will also show that such use of atomism concerns the question of what the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, may posit as the unit of analysis.

I apply Hayek’s distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ individualism to methodological individualism. Hayek traced ‘false’ individualism to Cartesian rationalism; Hayek’s rejection of Mises’ praxeology was due to its rationalist underpinnings. The first half of this paper identifies praxeology’s foundational philosophical concepts, emphasising their Cartesian nature, and illustrates how together they constitute a case for methodological individualism: intuition and deduction; reductionism; judgement; dualism. In the second half of this paper, I draw upon philosophy and cognitive science to articulate ‘Hayekian’ (N.B. not Hayek’s) alternatives to these Cartesian concepts. The Hayekian alternative allows a ‘gestalt switch’ from the individual- to the system-level perspective. I therefore suggest that methodological individualism is both true and false: true, in that economic phenomena are grounded in the actions of individuals; false, in that certain problems might be reconceived/discovered at the system-level. I finish by suggesting three avenues of research at system-level: optimisation; stigmergy; computational complexity.