The Not-so-trivial Truth of Methodological Individualism

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.

2017

The explanatory power of structures in analytical sociologists’ agent-based models brings into question methodological individualism. We defend that (a) from an explanatory point of view, the syntactic properties of models require semantic conditions of interpretation drawn from a conceptual research framework; (b) in such a framework, social/relational structures have only partial, explanatory power (counterfactual); and (c) taking the explanation further through generative mechanism modeling necessitates calling upon methodological individualism’s generic framework of interpretation that relies on social actors’ rational capacity. According to this interpretive framework, forces in action in society are governed by the subjective meaning of/the reasons for individual actions.

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.

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.

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.

2014

Individualists about social ontology hold that social facts are “built out of ” facts about individuals. In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct kinds of individualism about social ontology, two different ways individual people might be the metaphysical “builders ” of the social world. The familiar kind is ontological individualism. This is the thesis that social facts supervene on, or are exhaustively grounded by, facts about individual people. What I call anchor individualism is the alternative thesis that facts about individuals put in place the conditions for a social entity to exist, or the conditions for something to have a social property. Examples include conventionalist theories of the social world, such as David Hume’s theories of promises, money, and government, and collective acceptance theories, such as John Searle’s theory of institutional facts. Anchor individualism is often conflated with ontological individualism. But in fact, the two theses are in tensio...

Journal of Economic Methodology, 2007