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: Thus we talk about them having plans, performing actions, suffering losses, and so forth. The doctrine of methodological individualism does not take issue with these ordinary ways of speaking, it merely stipulates that “in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action” (Weber 1922, 13). For Weber, the commitment to methodological individualism is very closely related to the commitment to verstehende (or interpretive) patterns of explanation in sociology. The reason for privileging individual action in sociological explanation is that only action is “subjectively understandable.” Weber reserves the term “action” to refer to the subset of human behavior that is motivated by linguistically formulated or “meaningful” mental states. ( 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).