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Reduction, Explanation, and Individualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Harold Kincaid
Harold Kincaid*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham
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Abstract

This paper contributes to the recently renewed debate over methodological individualism (MI) by carefully sorting out various individualist claims and by making use of recent work on reduction and explanation outside the social sciences. My major focus is on individualist claims about reduction and explanation. I argue that reductionist versions of MI fail for much the same reasons that mental predicates cannot be reduced to physical predicates and that attempts to establish reducibility by weakening the requirements for reduction also fail. I consider and reject a number of explanatory theses, among them the claims that any adequate theory must refer only to individuals and that individualist theory suffices to explain fully. The latter claim, I argue, is not entailed by the supervenience of social facts on individual facts. Lastly, I argue that there is one individualist restriction on explanation which is far more plausible and significant than one would initially suspect.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , December 1986 , pp. 492 - 513
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1986

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Footnotes

†

Helpful comments were made on earlier drafts of this paper by Geoffrey Hellman, George Graham, Terry Horgan, and Scott Arnold, and especially by two anonymous referees for this journal.

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