Against a Priori Arguments for Individualism

Philosophical Studies, 1992

S sis between Phenomenology of Spirit, a broad, inarticulate division of emphathe individual and his social environment has marked philosophical discussions of mind. On one hand, there is the traditional concern with the individual subject of mental states and events. In the elderly Cartesian tradition, the spotlight is on what exists or transpires "in" the individual-his secret cogitations, his innate cognitive structures, his private perceptions and introspections, his grasping of ideas, concepts, or forms. More evidentially oriented movements, such as behaviorism and its liberalized progeny, have highlighted the individual's publicly observable behavior-his input-output relations and the dispositions, states, or events that mediate them. But both Cartesian and behaviorist viewpoints tend to feature the individual subject. On the other hand, there is the Hegelian preoccupation with the role of social institutions in shaping the individual and the content of his thought. This tradition has dominated the continent since Hegel. But it has found echoes in English-speaking philosophy during this century in the form of a concentration on language. Much philosophical work on language and mind has been in the interests of Cartesian or behaviorist viewpoints that I shall term "individualistic." But many of Wittgenstein's remarks about mental representation point u p a social orientation that is discernible from his flirtations with behaviorism. And more recent work on the theory of reference has provided glimpses of the role of social cooperation in determining what an individual thinks.

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Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives, 2017

Although natural philosophers have long been interested in individuality, it has been of interest to contemporary philosophers of biology because of its role in different aspects of evolutionary biology. These debates include whether species are individuals or classes, what counts as a unit of selection, and how transitions in individuality occur evolutionarily. Philosophical analyses are often conducted in terms of metaphysics (“what is an individual?”), rather than epistemology (“how can and do researchers conceptualize individuals so as to address some of their scientific goals?”). We review several philosophical distinctions in order to shift attention from metaphysics to epistemology. Many controversies involve epistemological differences rather than metaphysical disagreement. This implies that a pluralist stance about individuality in biology is warranted and has metaphysical consequences because the pluralism emerges from the diversity of scientific interests that investigate the complexity of living phenomena.

2002

In this essay, I will sketch my view of the connections between some methodological assumptions in social philosophy, namely those of individualism, holism, and collectivism. My interest in doing so is to outline a rough conceptual landscape, into which an approach of collective actions and intentions can be placed.

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...

The argument presented here is an attempt to assert individuality against individualism as based upon a developmental conception of human potentiality and growth. It is in this developmental theme that a far richer concept of individual freedom as individuality is available as against that individualism which focuses on a moral and ontological ultimacy that stresses separation of individuals from each other. This is to do much more than affirm the social nature of the individual and of individuality but to go further and show how the 'free individual' emerges within social relations and conditions for human flourishing..