Methodological Individualism Research Paper

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Methodological individualism (MI) can be stated roughly as the thesis that explanations of social phenomena should appeal only to facts about individual people. This is a directive or rule, rather than a statement of purported fact—hence methodological individualism. But whether a rule is useful depends, in part, on the facts; the fact of gravity makes the rule ‘exit by the window’ poor advice. We need to ask whether society, individuals, and their relations are such as to make MI a sensible rule to follow, where explanation is our goal. Also, MI is a quite general rule. Few would deny that an individualistic explanation is sometimes in order. The question is whether it always is.

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1. Historical Background

The expression ‘methodological individualism’ seems ﬁrst to have been used in 1908 by Schumpeter, but the doctrine was expounded by Menger in the 1880s; it was a cornerstone of what came to be known as ‘Austrian method’ which stood in opposition to the German historical school (Hayek 1968, Nozick 1977). Emerging from within economic thought, MI has always had its strongest adherents—as well, it is claimed, as its greatest successes—in that domain. Success for holistic styles of explanation—explanation by reference to social ‘wholes’, their structure and their function—has been claimed most often in anthropology and sociology, the latter much inﬂuenced by Durkheim’s anti-individualism. Weber declared himself an individualist, but did not always follow its rule, and the best example of individualistic sociology in recent times may be the work of Homans (1967). History has been very much disputed territory, with both practicing historians and theorists of history divided as to whether MI is a rule they can or should adopt. Examples of ‘pure’ methodological individualism in the practice of any social science are hard to ﬁnd, and one theoretical issue is whether this is symptomatic of some deeper incoherence in the position.

Karl Popper’s writings, and those of his student John Watkins, sparked a debate between individualists and collectivists or holists that lasted through the 1960s (O’Neill 1973). But a second wave of interest in this dispute emerged in the 1980s as a number of authors turned to the issue with claims informed by recent developments in philosophy of mind, language, and biology, as well as by some rethinking of Marxist views. By and large, the terms of debate in the ﬁrst wave were set by individualists who saw themselves as opposed to political movements of the extreme left and right, and opposition to MI was portrayed as depending on a dangerous belief in inexorable laws of history and society. These considerations largely have been put aside in the second wave, and a number of broadly holistic positions have emerged which are not committed to the existence of laws of history, and which display no aﬃliation to the Hegelean tradition. In the view of some, the debate over MI can be settled only by assessing how successful individualistic social science is by comparison with its holistic rival. On that reading, the question is an empirical one. This research paper is written from a somewhat diﬀerent perspective, which aims at getting clear about the basic positions and argumentative moves of both sides. Without such clarity it will be easy to misinterpret the empirical results.

2. Collective Intention

This section begins by considering an objection that tends to be raised when individualists insist that it is the beliefs, motivations, and decisions of individuals that matter, though it will be put to one side quickly. The objection is that there is a sense in which groups of individuals can, say, form intentions to do things. Some accounts of group intentions (or what are sometimes called ‘we-intentions’) need present no problem for the individualist. On one account a group intention to do something consists of all the members of the group intending to play their part in doing it, and believing that other members of the group similarly intend; here there is no group intention over and above the intentions and beliefs of the members of the group (see, e.g., Toumela 1989). Searle has argued that such accounts are incorrect, and that we need to acknowledge the irreducibility of we-intentions to intentions with a singular subject. But Searle also argues that this is consistent with MI: when you and I intend that we play tennis, what happens is that I have an intention that we should play, and you have an intention with the same content; there is no suprapersonal ‘we’ having an intention (Searle 1995, pp. 24–6). However, Velleman has argued that a collective may literally have an intention and that this is not a case simply of a conjunction of intentions, whatever their form, possessed by individuals (Velleman 1997). Velleman’s shared intentions are not supposed to be lodged in a suprapersonal mind, because they are not supposed to be mental entities at all. Rather, they are linguistic. Still, on Velleman’s account, it can happen that the unit of intending is the collective and not the individual. So an explanation of events couched in terms of intentions need not be an explanation in terms of the mental states of individuals, and a restriction of our attention to the intentions of individuals might obscure a relevant explanatory factor. But at the very least the theory of linguistic intentions requires elaboration before it can be considered to pose a serious threat to MI. (See also the work of Gilbert 1989 who treats social groups as the subject of ‘we.’)

3. Reduction

In The Open Society and its Enemies Popper describes MI as the view that collectives must be reduced to individuals and their actions (Popper 1966, p. 91). What does reduction involve? An inﬂuential model for this sort of approach is microphysical reduction in the sciences; we reduce water to H O by showing that the properties of a body of water are just the properties of a collection of suitably related H O molecules (relations are important because the molecules have to have the right kinds of bonds, for example). A comparable reduction of social entities to individuals aims to show that social entities like collectives are nothing over and above collections of suitably related individuals.

A number of arguments have been oﬀered for thinking that this condition is not fulﬁlled. Reductive MI is rejected by some because it is supposed to depend on an implausible semantic thesis: that we can deﬁne all our social terms—like ‘class,’ ‘class conﬂict,’ ‘nation’—in individualistic terms (see, e.g., Mandelbaum 1955, reprinted in O’Neill 1973). Whether that semantic thesis can be defended is a diﬃcult issue, but we need not resolve it here. One can believe that social entities like nations and classes are nothing over and above collections of suitably related individuals without believing that the concept of a nation or of a class can be deﬁned in terms of individualistic concepts. Reductionism is a claim about what exists, and not a claim about deﬁnability. Similar claims about reduction without deﬁnition have been fruitfully pursued in the philosophy of mind (Davidson 1980) and in the philosophy of time (Mellor 1998).

But could a social entity, France, say, be reduced to individuals? Ruben, a contributor to the second wave, argues that France cannot be so reduced, because no class or group of individuals can have exactly the properties France has. For example, France has the property that it could have had a diﬀerent population, but the class of French people (past, present, and future) could not have had any person in it other than the persons it does have in it, since classes are deﬁned by their members. And if two entities do not share all their properties, they cannot be identical. On Ruben’s view, France is a holistic entity, not even constructed out of individuals, which bear to it only contingent relations (Ruben 1985, chap. 1). It should be said that Ruben is otherwise quite sympathetic to MI.

This argument is open to dispute if we think of terms like ‘France’ as referring to whatever thing occupies a certain role, just as ‘The Prime Minister’ refers to the person, whoever it is, who occupies a certain party-political role. There is no doubt that in 1999 John Howard was the PM of Australia and that counting John Howard and the PM would be double counting, despite the fact that the PM could have been someone other than Howard, while Howard could not have been someone other than himself. And when we speculate on what would have happened had the opposition leader, Kim Beazley, been PM, we are imagining a situation in which Beazley occupies that very same role, or something very like it. The qualiﬁcation ‘or something very like it’ is necessary because the PM’s role might be altered to some degree by, say, constitutional amendment. But there are limits to what is possible for the role by way of alteration; some alterations would be so substantial that we would regard them as resulting in the replacement of that role with something else—a role of President, for example. What role would something occupy in order to be France? France is a geo-political entity founded at a certain time in a certain way, with a subsequent history of relations to other geo-political entities like The Holy Roman Empire, Germany, and the EEC. Call that role F. If we are going to say that, by deﬁnition, France is the thing that occupies precisely the role F then it will be impossible to say that the history of France might have been diﬀerent. On the other hand it makes dubious sense to say that France might, for example, have had exactly the history of Italy (though of course Italy might have been called ‘France’). The solution, as with the role of Prime Minister, is to say that France is, by deﬁnition, the thing that occupies a role suﬃciently like role F; that leaves the matter vague, but since questions about what might have happened in history really are vague, this is no criticism of the present approach.

Now it may be that the thing that occupies the France-role at any given time is a collection of individuals standing in certain relations—along with other things like certain purely physical resources, perhaps. And diﬀerent collections of individuals will ﬁll this role at diﬀerent times, just as diﬀerent individuals are Prime Minister at diﬀerent times. Of course, the France-role and the Prime Minister-role are diﬀerent in that we think of the France-role as occupied by a single entity over the whole period that the role is ﬁlled at all, while we think of the Prime Minister role as occupied by many diﬀerent things— there is one France but there are many Prime Ministers. But treating France as one continuous entity is not ruled out on the present approach; a single living organism is constituted by the cells that make it up, but no cell need last the whole life of the organism. We may think of France as similarly constituted by an overlapping sequence of individual people, suitably related.

However, the idea of the individuals that constitute a social whole being ‘suitably related’ raises another objection to the individualistic reading of social entities. The objection is that the relations in which individuals have to stand in order for collections of them to ﬁll macrosocial roles are in fact social relations. So all we have is a reduction of the social to the social. Thus, it is arguable that a collection of persons constitutes a nation only if there are relations of subservience, or equality, or other obviously social relations, between those persons.

The ﬁrst thing to be said about this argument is that, even if it is correct, it allows us a reduction of the macrosocial to the microsocial. It would allow us to say that, while there are limits to how far individualism can be pressed, we have shown at least that the only social relations constitutive of collectives are relations between individuals. That would be progress from the individualist’s point of view. The second thing to be said is that the argument may not be correct. We might counter the argument by making the same move with respect to the social relations between individuals that we made in the case of supposed social wholes. We said that deciding whether there is such a thing as France at a given time is a matter of deciding whether something occupies the France-role at that time. Similarly, deciding whether two individuals stand in a social relation of equality at a time may be a matter of deciding whether there is something that occupies what we might call ‘the equal-citizenship role.’ It might turn out that the thing that occupies the equalcitizenship role is, say, a presumably very complex psychological relation. How might we spell out this role? The following is on the right lines, though greatly simpliﬁed: the equal-citizenship relation is that relation, whatever it is, which in normal circumstances ensures that the law will be applied in the same way in similar cases and regardless of class, race, sex, and various other factors. And we may then ﬁnd that the thing which does ensure this is a complex psychological relation between individuals, involving beliefs, desires, values, and behavioral dispositions.

These seem the most promising sorts of moves open to the individualist, though whether they will ultimately succeed is something we cannot settle here. Rather, it will be assumed simply from now on that it is successful—thereby conceding apparently vital ground to the individualist—and ask whether we would then be justiﬁed in agreeing with MI that explanations of social phenomena ought to appeal only to facts about individuals.

4. Reduction and Explanation

Before we try to answer this question it is worth making some points about the relations between the claim that the social is reducible to the individual and the claim that explanations of the social should appeal only to facts about individuals. First, the claim that social entities are reducible to individuals is a factual claim and not a methodological rule. But recall our decision to see whether MI is an appropriate rule. It would certainly seem that if reducibility is true, the conditions for the application of MI could scarcely be more favorable. We shall see that even if reducibility is true, the victory of MI is not assured. Second, MI might be formulated in a way that does not depend on a claim about reduction. Popper has said that ‘… we must try to understand all collective phenomena as due to the actions, interactions, aims, hopes, and thoughts of individual men (Popper 1960, p.157), which suggests the view that while social entities are real and (perhaps) not reducible to individuals, their existence, persistence, character, and alteration ought to be accounted for in terms of individuals alone. But it is worth remarking that even those who deny reducibility of the kind described above would probably assent to a weaker thesis of the dependence of the social on the individual. A way to make this view more precise is by appeal to the idea of supervenience. Supervenience theses tell us what features of the world need to be independently speciﬁed, and what features we get for free, so to speak, by specifying other features. And it is certainly a plausible thought that by specifying all the facts about individual thought and action, we thereby ﬁx the facts about the social. Imagine a world that is absolutely indistinguishable from our world from the point of individual thought and action; would there be any social diﬀerences between the worlds? Assuming, rather plausibly, that the answer is no, we can conclude that the social supervenes on the individual (Currie 1984). But notice that this, sometimes called global supervenience, is a very weak claim, and one that tells us little about the prospects for individualistic explanation of social phenomena. In particular, it does not give us any right to think that we shall be able to demarcate some manageable subclass of the individual facts in terms of which to explain any given social phenomenon. For all supervenience tells us, the most we could say is that the totality of individual facts explains the totality of social phenomena. A workable theory of individualistic explanation requires us to ﬁnd local connections between the individual and social.

Third, an issue of the kind that delights philosophers arises when we look more closely at the claim that facts about social wholes like countries and classes can be reduced to facts about individuals and individual psychology. Perhaps the most complex group of problems that philosophy of mind will take into the new millennium is that raised by the doctrine of ‘externalism.’ At least since Descartes there has been a tendency in philosophy to assume that nothing follows about the world from what goes on in the mind; one can have an inner life of meaningful thoughts and still not be sure that anything external corresponds to those thoughts—hence Descartes’ worry about skepticism. But this mind–world dualism (not at all the same as mind–body dualism) has been under attack, and many philosophers now hold that the contents of some thoughts depend essentially on the existence of the things they refer to. This is externalism (see Putnam 1975 and the essays in Pettit and McDowell 1986). If externalism is true, then, so the argument goes, supposed reductions or explanations of the social in terms of the individual may turn out to be reductions or explanations of the social in terms of, among other things, the social. While the true implications of externalism are notoriously diﬃcult to see, a preliminary response to this argument would be to ﬁnd some way of ensuring that the mental states that we appeal to in explaining social phenomena are never ones with the kinds of contents that raise these externalist problems. While this and other potential solutions to the diﬃculty take us beyond the limits of the present survey, we do have here a striking illustration of the interconnection of social philosophy and the philosophy of mind.

Fourth, a claim about the reducibility of social entities should not be confused with a claim to the eﬀect that social entities do not exist. The reduction of water to H O is not grounds for doubting that water exists; in fact successful reductions (as opposed to what philosophers sometimes call ‘eliminations’) show that the reduced entities do exist. But this creates a problem for an individualist. If social entities are reducible, then why should an individualist not refer to them in her explanations? And what, in that case, would be left of the idea of a distinctively individualistic explanation? Perhaps the individualist should be concerned, not about whether, but about how we refer to social entities. Their objection would then be to references to social entities which fail to make manifest their reducibility; we should refer to France, not as, say, ‘France’ but as ‘such and such a group of individuals bearing such and such relations to one another.’ This is an issue we shall come back to, but on the face of it the claim is implausible. Who would insist, comparably, that we never satisfactorily explain an accident by saying that there was water on the street without also making it manifest how the body of water in question was made up of H O molecules? Perhaps the individualist thinks that we should at least not refer to social entities unless we are conﬁdent that we could give an individualistic reduction of them. But who would claim that all explanations that appealed to water were illegitimate prior to the chemical revolution in the late eighteenth century?

What is left to the individualist? They may say that while all sorts of nonindividualistic explanations may be given and accepted, because they are the best we can get in the circumstances, epistemic considerations always favor the move to an individualistic explanation where one is available. For such a move will always be from an explanation which refers to social entities in a way which does not make their individualistic constitution manifest, to an explanation which refers to social entities in a way which does. And such a move will always represent an increase in relevant explanatory information. This is a plausible and inﬂuential thought that deserves some attention.

5. Explanation and Information

One person who holds this view is Elster (see Elster 1985). Elster advocates MI from a Marxist position— an indication of the shift in the terms of the debate that has taken place between the ﬁrst and second waves, though some other writers inﬂuenced by Marx continue to oppose MI (see Cohen 1978, Wright et al. 1992). Elster argues that we all have reason to prefer individualistic explanations to explanations in terms of social aggregates. First of all, microlevel explanations reduce the time-lag between cause and (putative) eﬀect, making us less vulnerable to the confusion of causation with mere correlation. Second, understanding is increased when we ‘open up the black box’ and look at the ‘desires and beliefs that generate the aggregate outcomes’ (Elster 1985, p. 5). This second remark is somewhat misleading in that Elster does not argue that we ought to construct social explanations by examining the actual beliefs and desires of the real people involved in the phenomenon to be explained. Rather, his commitment to MI is a commitment to ‘rational actor explanations’ wherein we explain what happened as a rational response on the part of individuals to their situation, without looking at the actual details of their mental states (without, in other words, opening the black box at all).

But individualists who do not follow Elster’s enthusiasm for rational actor explanations and who think that our business is with the empirical study of actual mental states will still agree with him in this:

That the great strength of individualistic explanation is that they give us more explanatorily relevant information than holistic explanations do. Thus, Watkins says that ‘There may be unﬁnished or halfway explanations of large-scale social phenomena …; but we shall not have arrived at rock-bottom explanations … until we have statements about the dispositions, beliefs, resources, and interrelations of individuals’ (Watkins 1957, p. 168). Individualists may agree that in many situations we have to make do with aggregate-level explanations because the relevant individualistic detail is not available to us. But they will say that it is one thing to tolerate aggregate-level explanations when nothing better is available, and quite another to prefer them.

6. Levels of Explanation

An obvious response to this line of thought is to point out that it can be extended in unwanted ways. Note that the individualist’s case, outlined in Sect. 3, for a reduction of the social to the individual has a parallel in an argument for the reduction of the individual to microphysics. Those who adopt a functionalist view of the mind think that the idea of a mental state is the idea of something that ﬁts a certain causal role, and that the things that do ﬁt those mental states are purely physical states of the brain. On this view, pain is (roughly) whatever is caused by damage to the body and which in its turn causes us to avoid the cause of the damage. Most scientists and philosophers think that what has that causal role is some physical state of the brain. So pain will turn out to be that brain state. So why, if we reject unanalyzed references to social wholes, ought we to be content with similarly unanalyzed references to persons, minds, and mental states? Why not insist that these be spelt out in terms of the physical states that occupy the relevant roles? Popper and Watkins would deny the claim that mental state-roles are occupied by purely physical states because they believe that there is a nonphysical mind which makes an independent contribution to causation (see, e.g., Popper et al. 1984), so they would be able to claim that descent below the level of the individual and her mental states to the level of physical causation is a transition that involves loss of explanatory information. But belief in this kind of dualism is not widely shared. Another response would be to say that our methodological obligation is not always to descend to the most basic level, but to the most basic level within the relevant domain. If our interest is in the domain of the social sciences, then the most basic level is that of the individual; anything below that ceases to be social science. But suppose I declare my interest to be in holistic social science; what is an individualist to say when I refuse to countenance explanations that go below the level of the most basic social wholes, whatever they are?

It is time to question the assumption, shared by individualists like Elster and Watkins, that descending to lower levels always makes for increases in explanatory information. Jackson and Pettit have argued that higher level explanations may in fact convey information, including causally relevant information, not even implicitly conveyed by lower level ones (Jackson and Pettit 1992a, 1992b). Jackson and Pettit make a distinction between causally eﬃcacious and causally relevant facts, the latter being a more inclusive class than the former. They contend that it is sometimes the case that, by appeal to a higher order explanation, we can locate causally relevant facts that we could not locate by appeal to an explanation of lower order which tells us only about what is causally eﬃcacious. Consider an explanation of the decline of religious practice in terms of increased urbanization, an explanation that accounts for changes in one social institution by appeal to changes in another. What would we lose by replacing this explanation with a much more detailed one in terms of the changing values, employment, and location of individuals, the decisions of individuals to close certain parishes, the inexperience of ministers in new parishes, etc.? By deleting urbanization from our explanation we lose sight of this, that the eﬀect brought about by these individual decisions, namely reduced religious observance, would have been brought about by any other combination of individual decisions as long as it was a combination that manifested itself, at a higher level, as increased urbanization. We would go wrong to suppose that what was crucial to the decline of religion was that Smith moved from village A to town B, that he went from working on this farm to working in that factory, along with all the other speciﬁc, causally eﬃcacious facts about Smith and about other individual people. What was crucial was that something took place at the level of individuals that constituted urbanization, and there are many combinations of individual events other than the combination that actually occurred that would have done that. So the shift from the holistic to the individualistic explanation involves loss, as well as gain, of causally relevant information. The gain is in the speciﬁcity of detail: we now know which combination of ‘microfacts’ determined the macrofacts about the decline of religion. The loss is in breadth: the macro-explanation identiﬁed for us a class of combinations of microfacts, any one of which would equally have explained the decline of religion—namely the class of combinations which determine that urbanization occurred.

7. Conclusion

The conclusion, then, is that even on epistemic grounds alone, and ignoring pragmatic factors, an individualistic explanation is not automatically to be preferred to a nonindividualistic one. But it does not follow that appeals to the beliefs and motives of individuals—real or ‘typical’—can simply be jettisoned from the project of social explanation. In one vital respect, the relation between the individual and the social is not like that between the microphysical and the social. While in both cases we have a supervenience relation, in the former case but not in the latter we have something more. Facts about individual belief and motivation contribute to the intelligibility of social phenomena, while facts about the microstructure of someone’s brain do not contribute to the intelligibility of her beliefs and motives (Rudder Baker 1995). Consequently, whatever higherlevel social facts we may invoke to explain a revolution, the decay of rural life, or the victory of republicanism, we cannot say in advance that we shall simply ignore individuals. Further, as we have acknowledged, the social exists at the level of the individual; facts about individuals are often themselves social facts. If this is right, the appropriate judgment on MI would seem to be this: that we cannot accept the claim that individualistic explanations are always to be preferred to explanations which invoke social entities without displaying how those entities can be reduced to individuals, that indeed such unreduced references to social entities sometimes carry information valuable for explanatory purposes. But we owe a debt, nonetheless, to those who have elaborated modes of individualistic explanation, since social inquiry cannot do without such explanations. The remaining methodological questions are about how and in what circumstances individualistic and holistic factors can best be combined, and about whether there are any styles of holistic explanation that we can say on philosophical or empirical grounds are always to be avoided.

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