Abstract
Starting from the plurality of explanatory strategies in the actual practice of social scientists, I introduce a framework for explanatory pluralism – a normative endorsement of the plurality of forms and levels of explanation used by social scientists. Equipped with this framework, central issues in the individualism/holism debate are revisited, namely emergence, reduction and the idea of microfoundations. Discussing these issues, we notice that in recent contributions the focus has been shifting towards relationism, pluralism and interaction, away from dichotomous individualism/holism thinking and a winner-takes-all approach. Then, the challenge of the debate is no longer to develop the ultimate individualistic approach or defending the holist approach, but rather how to be combine individualism and holism; how can they co-exist, interact, be integrated or develop some division of labour, while making the best out of the strengths and limitations of the respective explanatory strategies of holists and individualists? Thus, the debate shifts to how exactly pluralism should be understood as the next leading question, going beyond the current individualism/holism debate. The paper ends with a discussion and evaluation of different understandings of explanatory pluralism defended in the literature.
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Notes
- 1.
This framework was developed by analyzing discussions about ‘the best explanation’ among social scientists with case-studies done in sociology, economics, international relations, history, medical science, etc, see, e.g., Van Bouwel (2003, 2004b), Van Bouwel and Weber (2002a, 2008a), Weber and Van Bouwel (2002).
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- 3.
- 4.
In an earlier paper, I extensively show how the framework can be used to deal with this question, see De Langhe et al. (2007).
- 5.
I refer the interested reader to our 2007 paper for further details.
- 6.
Cf. Van Bouwel and Weber (2002a).
- 7.
Cf. Weber and Van Bouwel (2002).
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- 9.
I consider drawing explanatory consequences from ontological arguments to be problematic and impoverishing, cf. Van Bouwel and Weber (2002b, 2008b) and Van Bouwel (2004a, c). Notwithstanding the critical questions I raise concerning the ontological approach, let it be clear that ontological debates could play a legitimate role in considering methodological possibilities of a particular theory, model or approach. The ontological moves I criticize are different in that they are often made a priori (not on the basis of a thorough study of social scientific practice) and that the results of the ontological statements are to be generalized across the social sciences (not limiting them to the particular theory, model or approach).
- 10.
Ontological emergence, on the one hand, claims that novel, real and irreducible properties do exist (or come into existence) on the higher level. These emergent properties are just as real as physical properties. Following epistemological emergence, on the other hand, the concept of emergence is characterized in terms of possibilities of and limits on human knowledge of complex systems: it deals with the (in)adequacy of reducing theories and is based on the fact that it sometimes appears to be impossible to understand the global behavior of a complex system by analyzing the local behavior of the individual parts. (cf. Van Bouwel 2010)
- 11.
Others have labeled this kind of ontology the Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA).
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- 13.
For those interested, in Van Bouwel et al. (2011), I showed the indispensability of reductive explanations using an example taken from social scientific practice, i.e. comparing the best answers to the following explanation-seeking questions (I) Why do we have high crime rates in American society? (II) Why does criminal or deviant behaviour manifests itself in American-born students A, B, C, but not in foreign-born X, Y, Z? (III) Why does person A manifest criminal behaviour, while B does not (even though A and B share the same social environment)?
- 14.
Further, Mitchell (2009) also distinguishes Anything Goes pluralism and moderate pluralism. The former speaks for itself, the latter is an understanding of pluralism that promotes a temporary plurality of competing theories as a means toward achieving a unified theory in the long run. I will not discuss these forms of pluralism here.
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- 16.
For a more extensive discussion and evaluation of different understandings of pluralism, also see Van Bouwel (2009).
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Julie Zahle, Finn Collin and Linnéa Arvidsson for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Van Bouwel, J. (2014). Explanatory Strategies Beyond 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_9
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