5 - Methodological individualism

Summary

Upon entering the domain of social sciences one is confronted with the perennial issue of the antagonism between the individualist and collectivist forms of explanation of human social phenomena. We have already encountered this dilemma in our earlier discussion of the epistemic strategies pursued at large in contemporary science; in this chapter we focus on the more specific formulations of the debate in social theory, between methodological individualists and the so-called “methodological collectivists” or “holists.” It will clarify matters if we first elucidate the salient features of the two camps. Imagine, first, a political situation in which radical minorities of the Left and the Right frame the political discourse in preferred radical binary terminology, labeling their opponents as “communists” or “fascists”. In such an environment the semantic cut of the population into two antagonistic camps is, of course, arbitrary and it is directed toward the absorption of the middle ground, based on the old strategic principle that those who are not friends of our enemies surely belong to our camp. “Anti-communist” or “anti-fascist” crusades would emerge putting pressure and, possibly, silencing the many other moderate voices. Apparently, something of that sort has happened in the debate between radical individualists and radical collectivists, an agon fueled by the foundationist, absolutist assumptions of the received positivist philosophy of science. The debate was framed primarily by the advancing armies of logical empiricists and other affine analytical philosophers (see Dray 1968; O'Neill 1973; Popper 1966; Suppe 1977; Watkins 1957; cf. Margolis 1977) who successfully labeled all those opposing epistemic individualism as “ “collectivists.”