Methodological Individualism

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...

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.

The British Journal of Sociology, 1968

In this paper we examine the major motivations for methodological individualism understood as a claim about explanation. We start out by introducing the methodological individualism-holism debate while distinguishing two forms of methodological individualism: a form that says that individualist explanations are always better than holist accounts and a form that says that providing intervening individualist mechanisms always makes for better explanations than purely holist ones. Next, we consider five lines of reasoning in support of methodological individualism: arguments from causation, from explanatory depth, from agency, from intervention, and from normativity. We argue that none of them offer convincing reasons in support of the two explanatory versions of individualism we consider. While there may well be occasions in which individualists' favorite explanations are superior, we find no reason to think this always must be the case.

Synthese, 2019

In the recent methodological individualism-holism debate on explanation, there has been considerable focus on what reasons methodological holists may advance in support of their position. We believe it is useful to approach the other direction and ask what considerations methodological individualists may in fact offer in favor of their view about explanation. This is the background for the question we pursue in this paper: Why be a methodological individualist? We start out by introducing the methodological individualism-holism debate while distinguishing two forms of methodological individualism: a form that says that individualist explanations are always better than holist accounts and a form that says that providing intervening individualist mechanisms always makes for better explanations than purely holist ones. Next, we consider four lines of reasoning in support of methodological individualism: arguments from causation, from explanatory depth, from agency, and from normativity. We argue that none of them offer convincing reasons in support of the two explanatory versions of individualism we consider. While there may well be occasions in which individualists' favorite explanations are superior, we find no reason to think this always must be the case. Title

Journal of Economic Methodology, 2007

The present work aims at criticising the foundationalist assumptions of Methodological Individualism (MI) in the social sciences by showing that they depend on one, but not necessarily the only, conception of the role of explanation in the construction of overall sociological theories. Philosophical arguments have been supplemented with a bird's-eye survey of contemporary social research in order to identify such conceptions in common strands of empirical research. This method tries to comply with the need for a tighter interaction between philosophy of science and working social science .

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.

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