Abstract
The debate between the individualist and the holist understanding of social items (social entities, events, institutions, phenomena and so on) has a long history and potentially a wide range of political implications. Political positions and political assumptions often play a significant role in the debate and it is not rare that participants in the discussion seek to associate the positions they oppose with unpopular political views, instead of providing actual theoretical arguments. The tendency to associate individualist positions in the social sciences with political libertarianism and neo-liberal economic agendas is particularly common. At the same time, disciplinary politics and concerns about the integrity of the social sciences (especially in the form of fears from their reducibility to psychology) also play an important role in the debate. In this paper I analyze such political assumptions that often motivate, or are stated to motivate, the debate.
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Notes
- 1.
Giddens (1979, pp. 94–95) is somewhat unclear, but I assume that he relies on this argument when he says that social institutions ‘are the outcome of action only in so far as they are also involved recursively as the medium of its production.’
- 2.
Since Zahle and Kincaid (2019, p. 658) refer to Kincaid’s own book Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences for this argument, one can assume that they endorse it, though the situation is unclear because they do not state the page. Their statement later on the same page ‘explanations invoking roles in organizations are the most social’ confirms that they assume that individualist understanding of organizations is impossible. There is no reason why individualist explanations could not invoke roles in organizations.
- 3.
As he put it, he regarded them as ‘Objecten [sic] unserer Anschauung oder unseres Denkens’ (Cantor, 1869, p. 481).
- 4.
An intrinsic property is the property of the object (Paul is six feet tall) whereas an extrinsic property is the property the object has in relation to other objects (Paul is taller than Peter). (For an explanation of this distinction see Marshall & Weatherson, 2018.) Extrinsic properties are also sometimes referred to as ‘relations.’ The fact that a person has a certain mental state that instantiates a mental content is an intrinsic property of that person. Sometimes extrinsic properties may be accounted of in terms of interactions, as Weatherson and Marshall put it, ‘We have other [extrinsic] properties in virtue of the way we interact with the world.’
- 5.
One may be tempted to try to interpret his concept of ‘individualistic properties’ (i.e. the properties of individuals) to include interactions in which individuals engage. Similarly, the definition of ontological individualism in the Abstract of his article says that ‘[o]ntological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts’ and one may think that ‘facts about individuals’ include facts about interactions in which individuals engage, including their interactions with the physical environment. However, these interpretations cannot be correct, considering the point that Epstein seeks to make. His line of argument is to point out that the physical environment contributes to the social environment—which in his view is meant to show that individuals and their properties are not sufficient to explain the properties of the social environment. Obviously, the impact of the physical environment on the social environment is something that individualists would seek to explain by referring to the interactions of individuals with the physical environment. Since he leaves this line of response unanswered, one can thus infer that by ‘individualistic properties’ he does not mean the interactions in which individuals engage. He actually cites J. W. N. Watkins’s statement that physical causes in society ‘operate either by affecting people, or through people’s ideas about them’ and then claims that according to Watkins ‘the social facts themselves are not dependent of physical factors at all’ (Epstein, 2009, p. 202). Here too, it is significant to note that such openly self-contradictory interpretation of Watkins’s view could have passed unnoticed the reviewers of Synthese.
- 6.
In a later book Epstein presented an equivalent straw-man argument in the form of a thought experiment about Starbucks that also suppressed the consideration of interactions between individuals and the physical environment (Epstein, 2015: 46). Epstein there imagined that a late night power spike causes serious damage to a great number of Starbucks stores and the company became insolvent. He claimed that ‘[i]n this example, the transition to insolvency involves property and equipment, not individuals.’ However, insolvency is impossible if no human individuals are involved. For insolvency to occur some human individuals would have to discover the broken equipment, employees had to be prevented from doing their work, and customers would have to stop buying coffee from Starbucks. If the spike merely affected equipment that was not in use, and its destruction passed completely unnoticed, insolvency would not have happened. This thought experiment is thus not suitable to show that individualism cannot deal with the impact of the physical on the social environment. In order to show this, one would have to construct an example in which the physical environment can affect the social environment in a way that would be independent of its interactions with the human individuals who participate in that social environment.
- 7.
The argument overlooks the role of interactions in the constitution of social entities. If the Senate appoints ‘individuals who perform interaction X’ this does not mean that the Senate appoints ‘individuals who perform interaction Y’—even though these happen to be the same individuals. In his third argument, Uzquiano imagines a situation in which the Committee on Judicial Ethics, but not the Supreme Court, joins the Committee of Ethics Committees. (As mentioned, the assumption is that the Committee on Judicial ethics and the Supreme Court are the same sets of individuals but they perform different interactions.) If membership in the Committee of Ethics Committees were merely a relation between a set and its elements, Uzquiano reasons, then both the Supreme Court and Special Committee on Judicial Ethics would be members of the Committee of Ethics Committees—and this was not meant to be the case. Once again, the response will be that the phrase ‘Supreme Court’ refers to individual justices together with the interactions they perform as justices, whereas the Committee on Judicial Ethics is individual members of the Committee together with the interactions that they perform as the members of the Committee on Judicial Ethics. Consequently, it does not follow that the Supreme Court joins the Committee of Ethics Committees if the Committee on Judicial Ethics does so.
- 8.
Zahle and Kincaid (2019, p. 672). The claim is not only inaccurate but also remarkably badly phrased. ‘Individual decisions’ could be even made by holistically understood social entities in the sense that decisions are countable and thus individual (a holist social entity could thus make its first, second, third individual decision). Also, decisions are not human beings and they cannot have responsibility so it is meaningless to talk about ‘the responsibility of individual decisions.’ The authors are likely to have meant ‘decisions made by individuals.’ Such details are significant for the argument made in this article, since they show that in the case of a paper that argues an anti-individualist position even sloppy, anything-goes formulations can pass the reviewers and the editors of Synthese.
- 9.
The attribution of individualist views to Marx and Engels may sound unusual because many people associate their views with various Communist traditions and ultimately a holist worldview. Nevertheless, individualist views are particularly strong in their early writings such as the German Ideology and Holy Family where they associate individualism with materialism and correlate it to their rejection of Hegelian idealism. (See especially the first part of their German Ideoloogy, Marx, Engels, 1953, pp. 9–78). There exists an extensive discussion about their views when it comes to individualist perspectives on social phenomena. See for instance Israel (1971); Elster (1982, 1985), Dumont (1977, pp. 113, 125, 136–137), Weldes (1989), Wolff (1990), Tarrit (2006), Kumar (2008), and Levine et al. (1987).
- 10.
The school system is those individuals who work in education and their education-related interactions. There is no need to postulate it as a holistic social entity. School programmes are widely shared mental contents (among teachers, school administrations etc.) that describe the material that needs to be thought in schools. They are instantiated in the minds of individuals and can be codified (e.g. by means of texts)—but there is no need to postulate them as immaterial Platonic entities, over and above mental states of individuals.
- 11.
There exists a massive literature about New Zealand problems with leaking buildings. See Dyer (2012).
- 12.
By ‘implicit’ I mean that I am unaware that the social-theoretical understanding of building companies as defined by the law has ever been discussed in relation to the scandal, but the background legal assumption that enabled the disaster was clearly that building companies were entities on own and of their own kind, unidentifiable with individuals (such as their owners or share holders) and their interactions.
- 13.
- 14.
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Mitrović, B. (2023). Individualism-Holism Debate in the Social Sciences: Political Implications and Disciplinary Politics. In: Bulle, N., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41508-1_20
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