Abstract
After opening with some metaphilosophical preliminaries sketching a naturalist framework that guides the paper, I devote my discussion to identifying dead and live issues in the traditional individualism-holism debate. The third section discusses standard reductionist theses about theory reduction. Arguments given for and against such claims has been conceptual in nature and thus to my mind misguided. However, the empirical evidence against reducibility now seems overwhelming. More dead ends will be the topic of the fourth section, where I will discuss claims that society does not exist and claims that social mechanisms require accounts in terms of individuals. In the last Section I look at numerous places in the social sciences where there are interesting open issues around the individualism-holism controversy. Those issues are about how holist or individualist we must or can be in senses I specify. The live issues in the individualism-holism debate are not global ones to be decided on general conceptual grounds but local and contextual empirical debates about how far we can get by proceeding without institutional and social detail.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
I refer to both organizations and institutions because these terms are used differently. Some think of institutions as just norms and norms as just regularities in behavior. I have in mind a richer (and I think more realistic) notion of an institution.
- 2.
Thanks to Don Ross for noting the difference between folk psychological notions of character and more scientific notions of personality.
- 3.
See Guala (2012) for some of the issues.
References
Alexander, J. (2010). The structural evolution of morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Day, T., & Kincaid, H. (1994). Putting inference to the best explanation in its place. Synthese, 98, 271–295.
Doris, J. (2002). Lack of character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Elster, J. (1983). Explaining technical change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gode, D., & Sunder, S. (1993). Allocative efficiency of markets with zero intelligence traders. Journal of Political Economy, 101, 119–137.
Guala, F. (2012). Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35, 1–15.
Hannan, M., & Freeman, J. (1989). Organizational ecology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hedstrom, P., & Bearman, P. (2009). The Oxford handbook of analytical sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kincaid, H. (1996). Philosophical foundations of the social sciences: Analyzing controversies in social research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kincaid, H. (1997). Individualism and the unity of science: Essays on reduction, explanation, and the special sciences. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kincaid, H. (2012a). Oxford handbook of the philosophy of the social sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kincaid, H. (2012b). Naturalism and the nature of evidence in economics. In U. Mäki (Ed.), Handbook for the philosophy of science: Philosophy of economics (pp. 115–134). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Mallon, R., & Kelly, D. (2012). Making race out of nothing: Psychologically constrained social roles. In H. Kincaid (Ed.), Oxford handbook of the philosophy of social science (pp. 507–533). New York: Oxford University Press.
Moss, L. (2002). What genes can’t do. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Padgett, J., & Ansell, C. (1993). Robust action and the rise of the Medici, 1400–1434. The American Journal of Sociology, 98, 1259–1319.
Sober, E. (1989). Reconstructing the past. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sun, R. (2005). Cognition and multi-agent interaction: From cognitive modeling to social simulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thatcher, M. (1987, October 31). Woman’s own, 8–10.
Watkins, J. (1973). Methodological individualism: A reply. In J. O’Neill (Ed.), Modes of collectivism and individualism (pp. 179–185). London: Heinemann.
Zahle, J. (2007). Holism and supervenience. In S. Turner & M. Risjord (Eds.), Handbook of philosophy of science: Philosophy of anthropology and sociology (pp. 311–343). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Acknowledgments
Finn Colin, Julie Zahle, and Don Ross made careful comments that much improved this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kincaid, H. (2014). Dead Ends and Live Issues in the Individualism-Holism Debate. In: Zahle, J., Collin, F. (eds) Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Synthese Library, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05344-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05344-8_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05343-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05344-8
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)