Abstract
As well as being accused of being committed to reductionism, methodological individualism has been criticized because it has been considered to be tantamount to a utilitarian theory of action. According to utilitarianism (and specifically according to the most recent version of it, namely the rational choice model), action is always based on instrumental rationality and on the attempt to maximize subjective utility on the basis of expected consequences (see Demeulenaere 1996, 2003; Boudon 2001, p. 42; Oliverio 2007, pp. 27 ff.). Because methodological individualism is confused with utilitarianism, it has been criticized on the grounds that many actions cannot be explained in utilitarian terms, and that utilitarianism is unable to decipher a great number of relevant social phenomena. However, the equivalence between methodological individualism and utilitarianism does not hold. While it is true that some methodological individualists endorse a utilitarian theory of action (e.g. Becker 1976), other advocates of this approach, such as Hayek, do not. The individualist tradition is informed by a wealth of perspectives. Because of the impossibility of explaining all human beliefs in utilitarian terms, the tendency to regard methodological individualism as being based on utilitarianism paves the way to an objectivistic approach to social research. It legitimates the idea that many collective beliefs can only be explained in holistic terms, i.e. as the products of a socio-cultural determinism.
This chapter draws on my chapter “Hayek’s Connectionist Psychology as a Defense for the Sociology of Good Reasons”. In Cherkaoui M and Hamilton P. eds. Raymond Boudon. A life in Sociology. Essays in Honour of Raymond Boudon, Vol. 2, Oxford: The Bardewell Press, 2009.
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Notes
- 1.
It must be noted that Boudon (1995, pp. 558–563) does not consider rationality as an ontological attribute of action. For him, it is only an epistemological presupposition which must be followed by studying social phenomena. This means that Boudon does not rule out the possibility that a sociologist, having investigated an action, can conclude that it is irrational because it is not the product of “good reasons” (see also Bronner 2003, p. 28).
- 2.
Contradicting his own criticism of Hayek, Boudon (1994, p. 61) partly acknowledged that an analogy exists between Hayek’s theory of the meta-conscious framework of cognition and Simmel’s theory of the a priori categories.
- 3.
As Di Nuoscio (2009, p. 186) remarked, Mises’ praxeology “can endow the Popperian logic of the situation with a sound logical basis”. According to Popper (1994), every action is based on the schema of “problems–theories–criticisms”. Consequently, Popper argues that understanding an action requires the reconstruction of the way in which the actor perceives the existence of the problem to be solved. The actor develops a sort of conjecture regarding his/her situation as well what he or she considers to be the best means to solve the perceived problem. This conjecture is what Popper calls the logic of the situation (see Jarvie 1972, pp. 3-36). In Popper’s opinion, the social scientist must develop an empirically testable meta-conjecture about the agent’s conjecture by reconstructing the agent’s interpretative horizon. The social scientist also has to explain whether the way in which the actor perceives the situation matches the objective situation. This is useful in explaining actions that do not achieve the expected goal. In fact, according to Di Nuoscio (2009), Mises provides a good foundation for Popper’s theory of the logic of the situation because, conceiving the rationality principle as a tautological property of action, he assigns “a sort of epistemological immunity” to this principle. As will be pointed out in Chap. 6, Popper failed to provide a satisfactory definition of the rationality principle (see also Leeson and Boettke 2006, pp. 15–20).
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Di Iorio, F. (2015). Rationality and Collective Beliefs. In: Cognitive Autonomy and Methodological Individualism. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19512-4_5
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