Title: Methodological Individualism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Headings: Methodological Individualism
Methodological Individualism
1. Origins of the Doctrine
2. Austrian School and the Methodenstreit
3. The Search for “Rock Bottom” Explanations
4. The Rational Choice Revival
5. Other Uses of the Term
6. Criticism
6.1 Statistical analysis
6.2 Subintentional explanations
6.3 Microrealization-robustness
6.4 Fallacies
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Content: Generally speaking: coughing is behavior, apologizing afterwards is action.) Updating the terminology somewhat, we can say that the defining characteristic of an action is that it is motivated by a mental state with propositional content, i.e., an intentional state. The importance of action for Weber is that we have interpretive access to it, by virtue of our capacity to understand the agent’s underlying motive. This permits the social scientist to “accomplish something which is never attainable in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the action of the component individuals” (Weber 1922, 15). Action-theoretic explanation is central to social-scientific analysis, therefore, because without knowing why people do what they do, we do not really understand why any of the more large-scale phenomena with which they are embroiled occur. Thus methodological individualism is a slightly misleading term, since the goal is not to privilege the individual over the collective in social-scientific explanation, but rather to privilege the action-theoretic level of explanation. This privileging of the action-theoretic level is methodological because it is imposed by the structure of interpretive social science, where the goal is to provide an understanding of social phenomena. Actions can be understood in a way that other social phenomena cannot, precisely because they are motivated by intentional states. Yet only individuals possess intentional states, and so the methodological privileging of actions entails the methodological privileging of individuals.