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Why be a methodological individualist?

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. The earliest reference to methodological individualism that we know is Schumpeter (1909).

  2. Recent defenses of methodological holism include (Archer 1995; Elder-Vass 2010; Garfinkel 1981; Hodgson 2007; Jackson and Pettit 1992a, b; Jones 1996; Kincaid 1996, 1997; List and Spiekermann 2013; Sawyer 2002, 2005; Weber and Bouwel 2002). For an overview of the different arguments recently offered in support of methodological holism, see Zahle (2016).

  3. Our main focus is on arguments, both explicit and implied. There are interesting questions about motivations for individualism, where motivations might be broader disciplinary norms and heuristics, for example. Describing those would mean a different project that we cannot pursue here, though our discussion of normative arguments can perhaps be seen in this vain.

  4. We refer to MI2 as the microfoundationalist view. As we spell out the basic claims of this position, it might also be referred to as structural individualism (at least following one common understanding of this notion). On this point see Udehn (2001), but also Demeulenaere (2011).

  5. Accounts of mechanisms may also identify the realizing components of an entity and the activities they enable [see, e.g., Machamer et al. (2000)]. To make the discussion manageable, we focus on MI2 as a claim about intervening variables only.

  6. Schelling was providing “how possibly” models and thus his own commitment to methodological individualism is unclear, yet later commentators certainly have taken his views to support methodological individualism (Raub et al. 2011).

  7. Homans, an early developer of network theory, saw it as an instantiation of methodological individualism (see Freeman 2004) and O’Sullivan and Haklay (2000) confirm the individualist tendencies in contemporary network theory; Epstein (2013), one of the pioneers and leading lights of agent based modeling is quite explicit that the goal is to explain everything in terms of individuals.

  8. Computable general equilibrium models refer to a current set of approaches that model entire economies using almost entirely aggregate variables quantifying over firms, sectors, etc. Even the rather different and much earlier Arrow-Debrieu general equilibrium models quantified over firms and thus were not entirely individualist.

  9. There used to be a common interpretation of Dennett which made him out to be an instrumentalist. That is an interpretation that was shown some time ago to be mistaken by Ross (2000) and explicitly affirmed by Dennett himself (2000) and is fairly explicit in the title of the paper here which is “Real Patterns” and not “Predictively Useful Patterns.”

  10. Ylikoski does not himself endorse the argument. Moreover, he presents a slightly different version of it insofar as he allows that the accounts of the intervening variables may also refer to households and the like. For an account of MI as centered round the idea that individuals are alone in acting by themselves in the social world, see Demeulenaere (2015).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants at the “1st Bayreuth Workshop in Philosophy of Economics: Explanation in Economics and the Social Sciences” for their helpful comments. Also, thanks to Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Tuukka Kaidesoja, Simon Lohse, Branko Mitrovic, Naftali Weinberger, and two anonymous referees for their useful suggestions.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Postbox 7805, 5020, Bergen, Norway

    Julie Zahle

  2. School of Economics, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7701, South Africa

    Harold Kincaid

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  1. Julie Zahle
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Correspondence to Julie Zahle.

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Both authors contributed equally to this paper.

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Zahle, J., Kincaid, H. Why be a methodological individualist?. Synthese 196, 655–675 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1523-8

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