Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T04:25:01.171Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Reduction of Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

D. H. Mellor
D. H. Mellor
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

How does the study of society relate to the study of the people it comprises? This longstanding question is partly one of method, but mainly one of fact, of how independent the objects of these two studies, societies and people, are. It is commonly put as a question of reduction, and I shall tackle it in that form: does sociology reduce in principle to individual psychology? I follow custom in calling the claim that it does ‘individualism’ and its denial ‘holism’.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 57 , Issue 219 , January 1982 , pp. 51 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 E.g. E., Nagel, The Structure of Science (London: Routledge, 1969), ch. 11; P. K. Feyerabend, ‘Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science Volume 3, H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (eds) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 28-97.Google Scholar

2 D. H., Mellor, ‘Physics and Furniture’, Studies in the Philosophy of Science, N., Rescher (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 184-185.Google Scholar

3 D., Davidson, ‘Psychology as Philosophy’, The Philosophy of Mind, J. Glover (ed.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 101-110.Google Scholar

4 S., Kripke, ‘Identity and Necessity’, Naming, Necessity and Natural Kinds, S. P. Schwartz (ed.) (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 66-101; C. McGinn, ‘Mental Acts, Natural Kinds and Psychophysical Laws I’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52 (1978), 195-220.Google Scholar

5 D. H., Mellor, ‘Necessities and Universals in Natural Laws’, Science, Belief and Behaviour, D. H. Mellor (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 105-119.Google Scholar

6 J. A., Fodor, ‘Special Sciences (or: the Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)’, Synthese 28 (1974), 97-115.Google Scholar

7 E.g. J. W. N., Watkins, ‘Ideal Types and Historical Explanation’, Modes of Individualism and Collectivism, J. O'Neill (ed.) (London: Heinemann, 1973), 153.Google Scholar

8 M. B., Hesse, ‘Fine's Criteria of Meaning Change’, Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968), 46-52.Google Scholar

9 See 5 below and H., Putnam, ‘Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology’, Cognition 2 (1973), 131-145; J. A. Fodor, op. cit., note 6; G. P. Hellman and F. W. Thompson, ‘Physicalism: Ontology, Determination, and Reduction’, Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), 551-564.Google Scholar

10 A. S., Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (London: Cambridge University Press, 1929), Introduction.Google Scholar

11 W., Sellars, ‘The Language of Theories’, Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science, H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (eds) (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1961), 57-77; D. H. Mellor, op. cit., note 2; ‘Do Cultures Exist?’, The Explanation of Culture Change, C. Renfrew (ed.) (London: Duckworth, 1973), 59-72; ‘Materialism and Phenomenal Qualities II’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 47 (1973), 107-119.Google Scholar

12 B. A. O., Williams, Problems of the Self (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), ch. 5.Google Scholar

13 G., Schlesinger, Method in the Physical Sciences (London: Routledge, 1963), ch. 2.Google Scholar

14 D. H., Mellor, op. cit., note 11, and ‘Natural Kinds’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 28 (1977), 299-312.Google Scholar

15 G. P., Hellman and F. W., Thompson, op. cit., note 9, 551.Google Scholar

16 D. H., Mellor, ‘Materialism and Phenomenal Qualities II’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 47 (1973), 107-119; J. Earman, ‘What is Physicalism?’, Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), 565-567.Google Scholar

17 E.g. B., Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), ch. 26.Google Scholar

18 E.g. A. N., Prior, Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), ch. 1.Google Scholar

19 K. R., Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 3rd edn, II, (London: Routledge, 1957), 69-73; I. Berlin, ‘Historical Inevitability’, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

20 Usefully collected in J. O'Neill (ed.), op. cit., note 7.

21 H. Putnam, op. cit., note 9.

22 K. R., Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 1957), 135.Google Scholar

23 D. H., Mellor, ‘McTaggart, Fixity and Coming True’, Reduction, Time and Reality, R. Healey (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

24 This is not a merely pedantic conclusion, to be evaded by some formal weakening of the identity conditions for sets. Groups can only be innocuously abstract objects, and group membership acceptable as a primitive formal relation, if the group's identity follows, as a set's does, from that of its members.

25 In particular, since languages are attributes of individual people as well as of groups, and extensional logic identifies attributes with the sets of their possessors, this confusion also helps to reinforce that of groups with sets of their members.

26 M., Lessnoff, The Structure of Social Science (London: Allen and Unwin, 1975), 80.Google Scholar

27 S., Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’, Semantics of Natural Language, D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), 313.Google Scholar

28 A. M., Quinton, ‘Social Objects’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 1976), 1-27.Google Scholar

29 M. Mandelbaum, ‘Societal Facts’, in J. O'Neill (ed.) op. cit., note 7, 221-234.

30 Op. cit., note 29, 222.

31 See e.g. R. C., Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).Google Scholar

32 In this respect these states are like dispositions in any other science; it does not make the way they explain action any less causal than, say, the way acceleration is explained by forces acting on inertial masses. See my ‘In Defense of Dispositions’, Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 157-181.

33 Op. cit., note 29.

34 This is not of course to deny that psychological states are affected by social ones, merely that the latter in t u r n reduce to other psychological and physical states.

35 Even if jealousy itself is required to have an actual object, the related state that generates and explains a's jealous actions can do without it, and that is what matters here.

36 D. H. Mellor, op. cit., note 5, section 2.

37 R. B., Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation (London: Cambridge University Press, 1953), ch. 9.Google Scholar

38 H. Putnam, op. cit., note 9, 134.

39 J. W. N., Watkins, Methodological Individualism: a Reply, in J. O'Neill (ed.) op. cit., note 7, 181.Google Scholar

40 L. J., Goldstein, Two Theses of Methodological Individualism, in J. O'Neill (ed.) op. cit., note 7, 286.Google Scholar

41 E.g. by E. A. Gellner, ‘Explanations in History’, in J. O'Neill (ed.), op. cit., note 7, 263; M. Mandelbaum, op. cit., note 29, 229.

42 S. D. T., James, Holism in Social Theory: the Case of Marxism (Cambridge University Ph.D. dissertation, 1978), 73. This dissertation has in fact been t h e main source, both of new ideas and recent references, in my latest revision of this paper, and my debt is none the less for my disagreement with it.Google Scholar

43 W. V., Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass: M. I. T. Press, 1960), ch. 2.Google Scholar

44 E.g. D., Davidson, ‘Belief and the Bases of Meaning’, Synthese 27 (1974), 309-323; D. K. Lewis, ‘Radical Interpretation’, Synthese 27 (1974), 331-344.Google Scholar

45 H. P., Grice, ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Logic, P. F. Strawson (ed.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 39-48; D. Davidson, ‘Truth and Meaning’, Synthese 17 (1967), 304-323.Google Scholar

46 J., Bennett, Linguistic Behaviour (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976), ch. 7; D. K. Lewis, Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

47 47 This is the latest of a series of successively and heavily revised papers on this topic, and I am indebted to all those who have commented on its predecessors, especially those present at the September 1978 meeting of the Thyssen UK Philosophy Group, at which the penultimate version was discussed. The present version was written during my tenure of a Radcliffe Fellowship, and partly while holding a British Academy Overseas Visiting Fellowship at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to the Radcliffe Trust and the British Academy for making that visit possible, and to my colleagues at Berkeley and Stanford for making it both profitable and pleasant. Since the final version of this paper was accepted for publication in 1980, the following relevant articles have appeared, of which it has therefore not been possible to take account: H. L. Dreyfus, ‘Holism and Hermeneutics’, Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980), 3-23; K.-D. Opp, ‘Group Size, Emergence, and Composition Laws’, Philosophy of Social Sciences 9 (1979), 445-455; C. Perry, ‘Individualism and Causal Explanations’, Agora 4 (1980), 1-15; C. Perry, ‘Popper, Winch and Individualism’, International Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1980), 59-71; C. Taylor, ‘Understanding in Human Science’, Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980), 25-38; P. Urbach, ‘Social propensities’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (1980), 317-328.