## 1. Origins of the Doctrine




The phrase *methodische Individualismus* was actually coined by
Weber's student, Joseph Schumpeter, in his 1908 work *Das Wesen und
der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalokonomie*. The
first use of the term "methodological individualism" in
English was again by Schumpeter in his 1909 *Quarterly Journal of
Economics* paper, "On the Concept of Social Value"
(see Udehn 2001, 214). However, the theoretical elaboration of the
doctrine is due to Weber, and Schumpeter uses the term as a way of
referring to the Weberian view.




In *Economy and Society*, Weber articulates the central precept
of methodological individualism in the following way: When discussing
social phenomena, we often talk about various "social
collectivities, such as states, associations, business corporations,
foundations, as if they were individual persons"(Weber 1922,
13). 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). 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. Thus
the "individualism" in methodological individualism is
more a byproduct of its central theoretical commitment than a
motivating factor. This is what defenders to the doctrine have tried
to communicate, with greater or lesser degrees of success, by claiming
that it is politically or ideologically neutral.




It is worth emphasizing the difference between *methodological*
individualism, in Weber's sense, and the older traditions of atomism
(or unqualified individualism) in the social sciences. Many writers
claim to find the origins of methodological individualism amongst
economists of the Austrian School (especially Carl Menger), and
doctrines articulated during the *Methodenstreit* of the 1880s
(Udehn 2001). Others trace it back to Thomas Hobbes, and the
"resolutive-compositive" method elaborated in the opening
sections of the *Leviathan* (Lukes 1968, 119). Yet the
distinctive character of this type of atomism was summed up quite
clearly by Hobbes, with his injunction to "consider men as if
but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddainly (like Mushromes)
come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each
other" (1651, 8:1). The atomistic view is based upon the
suggestion that it is possible to develop a complete characterization
of individual psychology that is fully pre-social, then deduce what
will happen when a group of individuals, so characterized, enter into
interaction with one another. Methodological individualism, on the
other hand, does not involve a commitment to any particular claim
about the *content* of the intentional states that motivate
individuals, and thus remains open to the possibility that human
psychology may have an irreducibly social dimension. Thus one way of
accentuating the difference between atomism and methodological
individualism is to note that the former entails a complete reduction
of sociology to psychology, whereas the latter does not.




Finally, it should be noted that Weber's commitment to methodological
individualism is closely related to his more well-known methodological
doctrine, viz., the theory of ideal types. Historical explanation may
make reference to the actual content of the intentional states that
motivated particular historical actors, but the sociologist is
interested in producing much more abstract explanatory
generalizations, and so cannot appeal to the specific motives of
particular individuals. Thus sociological theory must be based upon a
*model* of human action. And because of the constraints that
interpretation imposes, this model must be a model of
*rational* human action (Weber writes: "it is convenient
to treat all irrational, affectually determined elements of behavior
as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational
action" [1922, 6].)




Thus one of the most important consequences of Weber's methodological
individualism is that it puts rational action theory at the core of
social-scientific inquiry. This is why subsequent generations of
social theorists, under Weber's influence, sought to bring about the
methodological unification of the social sciences by producing what
came to be known as a "general theory of action" -
one that would broaden the economic model of action in such a way as
to incorporate the central action-theoretic insights of (primarily)
sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. The work of Talcott
Parsons in the first half of the century was the most important in
this regard, with the unification movement reaching its apogee in the
collaborative publication in 1951 of *Toward a General Theory of
Action*, co-edited by Parsons and Edward Shils. Yet shortly
thereafter, partly due to problems with the unification program,
Parsons abandoned his commitment to both methodological individualism
and action theory, adopting a purely systems-theoretic view. This led
to an overall lapse in the project of producing a general theory of
action, until it was revitalized in 1981 by the publication of
Jurgen Habermas's *The Theory of Communicative
Action*.


## 2. Austrian School and the *Methodenstreit*




It has never escaped anyone's attention that the discipline that most
clearly satisfies the strictures of methodological individualism is
microeconomics (in the tradition of neoclassical marginalism), and
that *homo economicus* is the most clearly articulated model of
rational action. Of course, this tradition has not always been in the
ascendancy within the economics profession. In particular, there are
many who have felt that macroeconomics could be a completely
self-standing domain of inquiry (reflected in the fact that the
undergraduate economics curriculum is still often divided into
"micro" and "macro.") There have always been
those who would like to plot the movements of the business cycle, or
of the stock market, in a way that disregards entirely the motives
that individual actors may have for doing what they do. Similarly,
many have tried to discover correlations between macroeconomic
variables, such as unemployment and inflation rates, without feeling
the need to speculate as to why a change in one rate might lead to
movement in the other. Thus there has always been a very lively
debate within the economics profession about the value of the
"rational actor" model that is at the heart of general
equilibrium theory.




One of the earliest iterations of this debate occurred during the
so-called *Methodenstreit* between members of the Austrian
School in Economics and the German Historical School. However, members
of the "first generation" of the Austrian School, such
as Carl Menger, were atomists (Menger defended his individualistic method
in terms of conceptual gains achieved by "reducing complicated
phenomena to their elements" [Menger 1883, 93]). It was
only members of the second generation, first and foremost Friedrich
von Hayek, who would explicitly identify themselves with the Weberian
doctrine of methodological individualism and defend it through
reference to the demands of interpretive social science. The key text
is Hayek's paper, "Scientism and the Study of Society,"
serialized in *Economica* (1942-44), and later published as the
first part of *The Counter-Revolution of Science* (1955).




In Hayek's view, the desire on the part of social scientists to
emulate the physical sciences creates an exaggerated fear of
teleological or "purposive" concepts. This leads many
economists to eschew any reference to intentional states and to focus
purely upon statistical correlations between economic variables. The
problem with this focus is that it leaves the economic phenomena
unintelligible. Take, for example, the movement of prices. One might
notice a constant correlation between the date of the first frost and
fluctuations in the price of wheat. But we do not really
*understand* the phenomenon until it has been explained in
terms of the rational actions of economic agents: an early frost
reduces yields, leading to less intense price competition among
suppliers, more among consumers, etc. Thus Hayek insists that, in
effect, all macroeconomic analysis is incomplete in the absence of
"micro" foundations.




It is important to note, however, that while Hayek has a model of
rational action as the centerpiece of his view, his is most
emphatically not a form of rationalism. On the contrary, he puts
particular emphasis upon the way that various economic phenomena can
emerge as the unintended consequences of rational action. Even though
the outcomes that people achieve may bear no resemblance to the ones
that they intended, it is still important to know what they
*thought* they were doing when they chose to pursue to course
of action that they chose - not least because it is important to
know why they persist in pursuing that course of action, despite the
fact that it is not producing the intended consequences.




Of course, part of Hayek's motivation for endorsing methodological
individualism and demanding that social-scientific explanations
specify a mechanism at the action-theoretic level is that he wants to
emphasize the limitations of the individual's actor's
perspective. It's fine to talk about macroeconomic variables like
"the inflation rate," but it is important to remember that
individual actors (generally speaking) do not respond directly to such
indicators. All that they can see are changes in the immediate prices
that they must pay for production inputs or consumption goods, and
this is what they respond to. The large-scale consequences of the
choices they make in response to these changes are largely unintended,
and so any regularity in these consequences constitutes a spontaneous
order. This is a crucial element of Hayek's information-based argument
for capitalism: economic actors do not have access to the same
information as economic theorists, thus it is only when we see the
operations of the economy through their eyes that we can begin to see
the advantages of a decentralized system of coordination like the
market.




To illustrate the importance of the individual's perspective, Hayek
gives the example of the process that leads to the development of a
path in the woods. One person works his way through, choosing the
route that offers the least local resistance. His passage reduces,
ever so slightly, the resistance offered along that route to the next
person who walks though, who is therefore, in making the same set of
decisions, likely to follow the same route. This increases the chances
that the next person will do so, and so on. Thus the net of effect of
all these people passing through is that they "make a
path," even though no one has the intention of doing so, and no
one even plans out its trajectory. It is a product of spontaneous
order: "Human movements through the district come to conform to
a definite pattern which, although the result of deliberate decisions
of many people, has yet not been consciously designed by anyone"
(Hayek 1942, 289).




The problem with ignoring the agent's perspective, in Hayek's view, is
that it can easily lead us to overestimate our powers of rational
planning and control, and thus to fall into "rationalism."
By contrast, the central virtue of methodological individualism is
that it helps us to see the limitations of our own reason (Hayek 1944,
33). Formulating theories that refer directly to the "interest
rate," or "inflationary pressures," or "the
unemployment rate" can mislead us into thinking that we can
manipulate these variables, and thus intervene successfully in the
economy. We forget that these concepts are abstractions, used not to
guide individual action, but rather to describe the net effect of
millions of individual decisions. The key characteristic of
methodological individualism is that it "systematically starts
from the concepts which guide individuals in their actions and not
from the results of their theorizing about their actions" (1942,
286). It therefore encourages, in Hayek's view, greater modesty with
respect to social planning.




Hayek does not mention methodological individualism after the
1950s. Indeed, the role that evolutionary explanations come to play in
his later work implies a tacit retraction of his commitment to the
doctrine.


## 3. The Search for "Rock Bottom" Explanations




For many years, the term methodological individualism was associated
primarily with the work of Karl Popper. This is due to the extensive
debate triggered by Popper's papers, "The Poverty of
Historicism" (1944/45), and later his book, *The Open Society
and Its Enemies* (1945). Popper, however, although making use of
the term, did little to defend his commitment to it. Instead he left
this job to his former student, J.W.N. Watkins. It was this debate
between Watkins and his critics that (perhaps unfairly) solidified the
association in many people's minds between Popper and methodological
individualism. (It was also this debate that brought the doctrine to
the widespread attention of philosophers.)




Unfortunately, the version of methodological individualism that Popper
bequeathed to his student Watkins was considerably more difficult to
defend than the one he inherited from Hayek. Since the beginning, the
precepts of methodological individualism were thought to have been
imposed by the special requirements of the social sciences. For both
Weber and Hayek, it was the reflection of a key difference between the
*Geisteswissenschaften* and the
*Naturwissenschaften*. Popper, however, denies that there are
any significant methodological differences between the two. Indeed,
his initial discussion of methodological individualism in "The
Poverty of Historicism," occurs in a section called "The
Unity of Method," in which he claims that both are simply in the
business of "causal explanation, prediction and
testing."(1945, 78). He goes on to deny that
"understanding" plays any special role in the social
sciences.




The problem that this creates for the doctrine of methodological
individualism is readily apparent. A social science that aims at
interpretation, or that uses interpretation as part of the centerpiece
of its explanatory strategy, has a very clear methodological reason
for privileging explanations that refer to individual actions -
since it is precisely the underlying intentional states that serve as
the object of interpretation. But if social scientists are merely in
the business of providing causal explanations, just like natural
scientists, then what is the rationale for privileging individual
actions in these explanations? There no longer appears to be any
*methodological* reason for doing so. Thus critics like Leon
Goldstein (1958), and later Steven Lukes (1968), would argue that
methodological individualism was actually just an oblique way of
asserting a commitment to metaphysical or ontological
individualism. In other words, Popper's "methodological
individualism" was actually a claim about what the world
"really" consisted of, little more than a fancy way of
saying "there is no such thing as society." Watkins went
on to reinforce this impression by reformulating the thesis as the
claim that the "ultimate constituents of the social world are
individual people" (1957, 105).




Watkins also provoked doubts about the methodological status of the
principle by distinguishing between "unfinished or half-way
explanations" of social phenomena, which might not specify an
action-theoretic or individualistic mechanism, and so-called
"rock-bottom explanations," which would (1957, 106). Yet
in so doing, he grants that these half-way explanations (the example
he gives is the relationship between inflation and the unemployment
rate), while they may not tell us everything we would like to know,
need not be meaningless or false. This creates problems, as Lars Udehn
points out, since the mere fact that one *can* explain social
phenomena in terms of individuals "does not imply the
methodological rule that they should be explained this way"
(2001, 216) - especially not if the "half-way"
knowledge obtained is sufficient for our (extra-scientific)
purposes.




Finally, it should be noted that Popper introduced a contrast between
methodological individualism and "psychologism," viz., the
view that "all laws of social life must be ultimately reducible
to the psychological laws of 'human nature'"(1945,
89). Nevertheless, in Popper's formulation, methodological
individualism does appear equivalent to at least some form of
psychological reductionism. At very least, his formulation - and
later Watkins's - left many commentators confused about how one
could affirm the former without committing to the latter (Udehn 2001,
204). More generally, it created a great deal of confusion about the difference between methodological individualism and atomism (Hodgson 2007, 214).


## 4. The Rational Choice Revival




For both Hayek and Popper, the primary motivation for respecting the
precepts of methodological individualism was to avoid "grand
theory" in the style of Auguste Comte, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl
Marx. Yet the motivation for avoiding this sort of grand theory was
not so much that it promoted bad theory, but that it promoted habits
of mind, such as "collectivism,"
"rationalism," or "historicism," that were
thought to be conducive to totalitarianism. Thus the sins of
"collectivism," and "collectivist" thought
patterns, for both Hayek and Popper, were primarily political. Yet as
time wore on, and the dangers of creeping totalitarianism in Western
societies became increasingly remote, the fear of collectivism that
underlay the debates over methodological individualism became
increasingly attenuated.




Thus the concern over methodological individualism began to fade away,
and might have disappeared completely had it not been for the sudden
explosion of interest in game theory (or "rational choice
theory") among social scientists in the 1980s. The reason for
this can be summed up in two words (and an article): the prisoner's
dilemma. Social scientists had always been aware that individuals in
groups are capable of getting stuck in patterns of collectively
self-defeating behavior. Paul Samuelson's "The Pure Theory of
Public Expenditure" (1954), Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy
of the Commons," (1968), and Mancur Olson's *The Logic of
Collective Action* (1965), had all provided very clear examples of
cases where the mere existence of a common interest among individuals
nevertheless failed to provide them with an incentive to perform the
actions necessary to realize that interest. What the story of the
prisoner's dilemma - and more importantly, the accompanying game
matrix - provided was a simple yet powerful model that could be
used to represent the structure of all these interactions (see
R. Hardin 1982).




This in turn gave renewed impetus to methodological individualism,
because it allowed theorists to diagnose with unparalleled precision
the errors that social theorists could be (and often were) led into if
they ignored the action-theoretic level of analysis. Methodological
individualism became important, not as a way of avoiding the political
thought-crime of "collectivism," but rather as a way of
avoiding demonstrably fallacious inferences about the dynamics of
collective action. For example, the traditional "interest
group" theory of democratic politics generally presupposes that
groups who share a common interest also have an incentive to promote
that interest, by lobbying politicians, funding research, and so
on. Olson's major contribution was to have driven home the point that
the existence of such a common interest just as often generates a
free-rider incentive. Individuals would benefit from acting to promote
that interest, but they would benefit even *more* by sitting
back while the other members of the group acted to promote it. As a
result, no one may act to promote it. However, Olson confined this
observation to large groups. The prisoner's dilemma, on the other
hand, demonstrated the ubiquity of this incentive structure.




Jon Elster's contribution to the history of methodological
individualism must be understood against this background. He presents
the doctrine as part of a friendly yet trenchant critique of the use
of functionalist explanations in the Marxist tradition; particularly
those that seek to explain events as ones that "serve the
interests of capital." The problem with these explanations,
Elster argues, is that they "*postulate a purpose without a
purposive actor*" (1982, 452), and therefore (he claims)
entail a commitment to some form of objective teleology. In itself,
there is very little new in this criticism. As G.A. Cohen argued, in
his response to Elster, there is no reason that the Marxian
functionalist cannot provide "elaborations" (Cohen 1982,
131) of these explanations, ones that specify how the benefit
produced evokes the phenomenon, without reference to any objective
teleology. This could be done either by appealing to an intentional
mechanism at the action-theoretic level or else a Darwinian
"selection" mechanism (Cohen 1982, 132). In such cases,
Elster's critique of functional explanation becomes just another
version of Watkins's demand for "rock-bottom" rather than
"half-way" explanations.




Thus what made Elster's attack so forceful was not the accusation of
objective teleology in Marxist theory, but rather the suggestion that
much of Marxian "class analysis" overlooked the potential
for collective action problems among the various world-historical
actors. Consider, for example, the familiar claim that capitalists
retain a "reserve army of the unemployed" in order to
depress wages. This means that individual capitalists must stop hiring
new workers at a point where marginal benefits still exceed the
marginal costs. What is their incentive for doing so? They have an
obvious free-rider incentive to keep hiring, since the benefits
stemming from depressed wages would largely be enjoyed by rival firms,
whereas the benefits of further hiring would flow to the bottom line.
In other words, the mere fact that it is in the "interests of
capital" to have a reserve army of the unemployed does not mean
that individual capitalists have an incentive to take the steps
necessary to maintain such a reserve army.




An even more disturbing consequence of the "rational
choice" perspective is the observation that the working class
faces a major collective action problem when it comes to carrying out
the socialist revolution (Elster 1982, 467). Fomenting revolution can
be dangerous business, and so absent some other incentive (such as
class solidarity), even workers who were convinced that a communist
economic order would offer them a superior quality of life might still
fail to show up at the barricades. Yet these possibilities were
largely overlooked, Elster suggests, because the failure to respect the
precepts of methodological individualism, along with the promiscuous
use of functional explanation, had led generations of Marxian
theorists simply to ignore the actual incentives that individuals face
in concrete social interactions.


 

Beyond the critique of functional explanations, Elster does not
advance any original argument in support of methodological
individualism. He does, however, return to the earlier Weberian
formulation of the position, with its emphasis on intentional action
(Elster 1982, 463): "The elementary unit of social life is the
individual human action," he argues. "To explain social
institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result
of the actions and interaction of individuals. This view, often
referred to as methodological individualism, is in my view trivially
true" (Elster, 1989, 13). Here one must assume that when he says
"trivially true," he is using the term in the vernacular
sense of "platitudinous" rather than the philosophical
sense of "tautologous," since he goes on to derive a
number of very substantive doctrines from his commitment to
methodological individualism. For example, he goes on to claim at
various points that methodological individualism commits him to
psychologistic reductionism with respect to sociology (although he
does not offer an argument for this claim).


 

Elster does not draw as sharp a distinction as he might have
between the commitment to methodological individualism and the
commitment to rational choice theory. Indeed, he also assumes that the
latter flows directly from the former. The version of rational choice
theory that Elster endorses, however, is one that is based upon a
traditional instrumental (or *homo economicus*) conception of
rationality, according to which "actions are valued and chosen
not for themselves, but as more or less efficient means to the a
further end" (Elster 1989, 22). He claims that this conception
of rationality is implied by the fact that decision theorists are able
to represent the rational actions of any agent possessing a
well-behaved preference ordering as the maximization of a utility
function. Yet whether utility-maximization implies instrumentalism
depends upon the version of expected utility theory that one
subscribes to. So-called "world Bayesian" versions of
decision theory, such as Richard Jeffrey's (1983) do not impose an
instrumental conception of rationality, since they permit agents to
have preferences over their own actions. Thus Elster's move from
methodological individualism to the instrumental conception of
rationality is based upon a *non sequitur*.




Nevertheless, as a result of Elster's arguments, methodological
individualism became synonymous in many quarters with the commitment
to rational choice theory. Such an equation generally fails to
distinguish what were for Weber two distinct methodological issues:
the commitment to providing explanations at an action-theoretic level,
and the specific model of rational action that one proposes to use at
that level (i.e., the ideal type). There are multiple
permutations. For instance, there is no reason that one cannot be a
methodological individualist while choosing to employ Habermas's
theory of communicative action rather than rational choice theory as
the model of rational action. In fact, this would make greater sense,
since game theory, strictly construed, has never purported to offer a
general theory of rational action. The Nash solution concept, which
provides the standard definition of a game-theoretic equilibrium,
specifically excluded all forms of communication between the players
(and the solution does not work in cases where communication does
intrude [Heath 2001]). Thus much of the furor over rational choice
imperialism has been based upon a failure to appreciate the
limitations of that model (in many cases both by its defenders and its
critics).


## 5. Other Uses of the Term




In the philosophy of mind, the phrase "methodological
individualism" is commonly associated with a claim made by Jerry
Fodor concerning the individuation of psychological states (1980,
1987, 42). It is important to emphasize that Fodor's use of the term
has nothing in common with its traditional use in the philosophy of
social science. Fodor introduces it by way of a distinction between
"methodological individualism" and "methodological
solipsism." His goal is to deal with variations on the
twin-earth problem, introduced by Hilary Putnam. The question is
whether an individual with a belief about water on earth, where water
is made up of H2O, has the *same* belief as an
individual with a belief about water in a parallel universe, where
water has the same appearance and behavior, but happens to be made up
of XYZ. The "externalist" is one who says that they are
not the same, whereas an "internalist" like Fodor wants to
say that they are - speaking roughly, that the content of
beliefs is determined by what is in the agent's head, and not what is
in the world.




The issue comes down to one concerning the individuation of mental
states. How do we determine what is and is not the "same"
belief? Fodor begins by introducing the constraint that he calls
"methodological individualism," viz., "the doctrine
that psychological states are individuated *with respect to their
causal powers*" (1987, 42). This implies, among other
things, that if one psychological state is incapable of causing
anything different to happen than some other psychological state, then
the two must be the same. "Methodological solipsism" is
the stronger claim that "psychological states are individuated
*without respect to the semantic evaluations*" (1987,
42). This implies, among other things, that even if one state is
"true" in some context and another is "false,"
the two may still turn out to be the same. As Fodor goes on to point
out, the semantic evaluation of a mental state will typically be
relational, e.g. whether certain beliefs about water are true will
depend upon how things happen to stand with water in the world; thus
methodological solipsism has the consequence of precluding one type of
relational property from playing a role in the individuation of mental
states. It is therefore "individualistic" in the everyday
sense of the term, since it suggests that what's going on in the
agent's head does most or all of the work in the individuation of
mental states. Methodological individualism, on the other hand,
"*does not prohibit the relational individuation of mental
states*; it just says that no property of mental states,
relational or otherwise, counts taxonomically unless it affects causal
powers"(1987, 42). Thus it is very unclear why Fodor chooses to
call this a form of "individualism," since these relations
could also be relations to other speakers, and not just the physical
word.




There is considerable infelicity in Fodor's choice of terms. He is
able to offer a cogent account of why methodological individualism
counts as a methodological constraint. He argues that the desire to
align terminological distinctions with objects having different causal
powers is "one which follows simply from the scientist's goal of
causal explanation and which, therefore, all scientific taxonomies
must obey" (1987, 42). Thus it is a methodological
precept. (Although one can see clearly here the stark contrast between
Fodor's use of the term and that of Weber or Hayek, for whom the
ability of the social scientist to provide something *beyond*
merely causal explanation was what imposed the methodological
commitment to the action-theoretic level of analysis.) It is simply
unclear why Fodor chooses to call it individualism. With
methodological solipsism, on the other hand, one can see why he calls
it solipsism, but it is unclear what makes it methodological. Indeed,
Fodor goes on to state that "solipsism (construed as prohibiting
the relational taxonomy of mental states) is unlike individualism in
that it couldn't conceivably follow from any general considerations
about scientific goals and practices. 'Methodological
solipsism' is, in fact, an empirical theory about the
mind."(1987, 43). Thus in Fodor's use of the terms,
"methodological individualism" is not really
individualistic, and "methodological solipsism" is not
really methodological.


## 6. Criticism




Much of the critical discussion of methodological individualism in the
philosophy of social science concerns the relationship between what
Watkins called "rock-bottom" explanations and
"half-way" ones - or those that do and those that do
not specify an action theoretic mechanism. In general, there is no
question that, given any particular half-way explanation of a social
phenomenon, it would always be *nice* to know what agents are
thinking, when they perform the actions that are involved in the
production of that phenomenon. The question is whether the explanation
is somehow *deficient*, or unscientific, in the absence of this
information. The answer to that question will depend upon one's
broader commitments concerning the status and role of the social
sciences. Nevertheless, it is worth noting two very common types of
social-scientific inquiry that fall short of providing the sort of
rock-bottom explanations that methodological individualism
demands:


### 6.1 Statistical analysis




Consider the following example of a social-scientific debate: During
the 1990s, there was a precipitous decline in violent crime in the
United States. Many social scientists naturally began to apply
themselves to the question of why this had occurred, i.e., they set
out to explain the phenomenon. A number of different hypotheses were
advanced: the hiring of more police, changes in community policing
practices, more severe sentencing guidelines for offenders, decreased
tolerance for minor infractions, an increase in religiosity, a decline
in the popularity of crack, changes in the demographic profile of the
population, etc. Since the decline in crime occurred in many different
jurisdictions, each using some different combination of strategies
under different circumstances, it is possible to build support for
different hypotheses through purely statistical analysis. For example,
the idea that policing strategies play an important role is
contradicted by the fact that New York City and San Francisco adopted
very different approaches to policing, and yet experienced a similar
decline in the crime rate. Thus a very sophisticated debate broke out,
with different social scientists producing different data sets, and
crunching the numbers in different ways, in support of their rival
hypotheses.




This debate, like almost every debate in criminology, lacks
microfoundations. It would certainly be nice to know what is going
through people's mind when they commit crimes, and thus how likely
various measures are to change their behavior, but the fact is we do
not know. Indeed, there is considerable skepticism among
criminologists that a "general theory" of crime is
possible. Nevertheless, we can easily imagine criminologists deciding
that one particular factor, such as a demographic shift in the
population (i.e., fewer young men), is *the* explanation for
the late-20th century decline in violent crime in the
United States, and ruling out the other hypotheses. And even though
this may be a "half-way" explanation, there is no question
that it would represent a genuine discovery, one that we could learn
something important from.




Furthermore, it is not obvious that the "rock-bottom"
explanation - the one that satisfies the precepts of
methodological individualism - is going to add anything very
interesting to the "half-way" explanation provided by the
statistical analysis. In many cases it will even be derived from
it. Suppose that we discovered, through statistical analysis, that the
crime rate varied as a function of the severity of punishment
multiplied by the probability of apprehension. We would then *infer
from this* that criminals were rational utility-maximizers. On the
other hand, if studies showed that crime rates were completely
unaffected by changes in the severity of punishments or the
probability of apprehension, we would infer that something else must
be going on at the action-theoretic level.




Results at the action-theoretic level might also prove to be random or
uninteresting, from the standpoint of the explanatory
variables. Suppose it turns out that the decline in crime can be
explained entirely by demographic change. Then it doesn't really
matter what the criminals were thinking - what matters is simply
that a certain percentage of any given demographic group has the
thoughts that lead to criminal behavior, so fewer of those people
translates into less crime. The motives remain inside the "black
box" - and while it might to nice to know what those
motives are, they may not contribute anything to this particular
explanation. In the end, it may turn out that each crime is as unique
as the criminal. So while there is a concrete explanation in terms of
actual people's intentional states, there is nothing that can be said
at the level of a general "model" of rational action. (In
this context, it is important to remember that methodological
individualism in the Weberian sense explains actions in terms of a
model of the agent, not the actual motivations of the real
people.)


### 6.2 Subintentional explanations




Consider another social-scientific debate, this time the controversy
over the data showing that stepparents have a far greater propensity
to kill very young children in their care than biological
parents. What would be involved in providing a rock-bottom explanation
for this phenomenon, one that satisfied the precepts of methodological
individualism? How informative would this be? It does not take much
effort to imagine what people are thinking, when they shake a baby or
hit a toddler. The motives are all-too familiar - almost
everyone experiences episodes of intense frustration or anger when
dealing with children. But that clearly does not explain the
phenomenon. The question is why one group systematically fails to
exercise control over these violent impulses, relative to some other
group. Since very few people do it as part of a well-conceived plan,
it is not clear that there is going to be an explanation available at
the level of intentional states, or even that a complementary account
of what is going on at this level will be in the least bit
informative. The problem is that the behavior is generated by biases
that function almost entirely at a subintentional level (Sperber,
1997). This suggests that an explanation in terms of intentional
states is not really "rock bottom," but that there are
deeper layers to be explored.




It is not difficult to imagine how such an explanation might
run. People experience a reaction to juvenile (or neotenous)
characteristics of the young that is largely involuntary. This
reaction is very complex, but one of its central characteristics is
the inhibition of aggression. People are also quite poor at
articulating the basis of this reaction, other than by repeated
references to the fact that the child is "cute." Of
course, the overall strength of this reaction varies from individual
to individual, and the particular strength varies with different
children. Thus it is possible that biological parents simply find
their own children "cuter" than stepparents do, and that
this translates into a slightly lower average propensity to commit
acts of aggression against them. Because they are unable to articulate
the basis of this judgment, any analysis at the intentional level will
simply fail to provide much in the way of an explanation for their
actions.




Furthermore, it would seem that much "deeper" explanations
of these behavioral tendencies are available. Most obviously, there is
an evolutionary account available, which explains parental investment
in terms of inclusive fitness (and also explains "new mate
infanticide" in terms of sexual selection). Because of this,
proponents of methodological individualism are open to the charge that
they are promoting half-way explanations, and that the evolutionary
perspective offers rock-bottom ones. More generally, any theory that
purports to explain the origin of our intentional states in terms of
deeper underlying causes, or that claims to explain much of human
behavior without reference to intentional states (such as Freudianism,
which treats many of our beliefs as rationalizations, our desires as
sublimations), will be unmoved by the methodological individualist's
demand that pride of place be assigned to explanations formulated at
the action-theoretic level.


### 6.3 Microrealization-robustness




Christian List and Kai Spiekermann (2013) have recently argued that
"causal-explanatory holism" is called for in the social
sciences under a very precise set of circumstances. Their general
thought is that descriptions can usually be formulated at different
levels of generality, and that in certain circumstances it may be more
illuminating to formulate explanations using concepts at a higher, rather
than a lower, level of generality. This is particularly so when a
higher-level property can be instantiated in various ways, but some
causal relation in which it is embedded continues to obtain regardless
of the particular instantiation (a condition that they refer to as
"microrealization-robustness"). This suggests that
methodological individualism will not be appropriate in cases where
"social regularities are robust to changes in their
individual-level realization" (629). Under such conditions,
"explanatory holism" is required. List and Spiekermann
specify three "jointly necessary and sufficient
conditions" (639) under which this will be so:



> 
> **Multiple levels of description:** The system admits
> lower and higher levels of description, associated with different
> level-specific properties (e.g. individual-level properties versus
> aggregate properties).
> 
> 
> 
> **Multiple realizability of higher-level properties:** The system's
> higher-level properties are determined by its lower-level properties,
> but can be realized by numerous different configurations of them and
> hence cannot feasibly be redescribed in terms of lower-level
> properties.
> 
> 
> 
> **Microrealization-robust causal relations:** The causal relations
> in which some of the system's higher-level properties stand are robust
> to changes in their lower-level realization.
> 
> 


 

An example they give is the "democratic peace hypothesis" (2013, 640),
that democracies do not go to war with one another. This is typically
explained in terms of internal structural features of democracies that
privilege norms of cooperation and compromise. There are, however, so
many ways of instantiating these features that an explanation at the
lower level of description, such as that of the individual, would be
unable to articulate the relevant causal relation.


### 6.4 Fallacies




The primary methodological reason, among social scientists, for adopting
a commitment to methodological individualism was to caution against
certain fallacies (ones that were quite common in 19th
century social science). Perhaps the greatest of these fallacies was
the one based on a widespread tendency to ignore the potential for
collective action problems in groups, and thus to move far too easily
"down" from an identification of a group interest to the
ascription of an individual interest. One way of avoiding such
fallacies was to force social scientists to look always at
interactions from the participant's perspective, to see what sort of
preference structure governed his or her decisions.




At the same time, it is worth noting that too much emphasis on the
action-theoretic perspective can generate its own fallacies. One of
the most powerful resources of sociological inquiry is precisely the
capacity to objectivate and aggregate social behavior using
large-scale data collection and analysis. The analysis of
social phenomena at this level can often generate results that are
counterintuitive from an action-theoretic perspective. Too much
emphasis on the action-theoretic perspective, because of its proximity
to common sense, can generate false assumptions about what must be
going on at the aggregate level. As Arthur Stinchcombe observes in his
classic work, *Constructing Social Theories*, constructing
"demographic explanations" of social phenomena often
requires a break with our everyday interpretive perspective. Too much
focus upon individual attitudes can lead us to make illegitimate
generalizations about the characteristics of these attitudes in groups
(1968, 67). For example, the stability of a belief in a population
only very rarely depends upon its stability in individuals. There can
be considerable volatility at the individual level, but so long as it
runs with equal force both ways, its prevalence in the population will
be unchanged (68). If ten per cent of the population loses their faith
in God every year, yet ten per cent have a conversion experience, then
there will be no change in the overall level of religiosity. This may
seem obvious, but as Stinchcombe observes, it is "intuitively
difficult for many people" (67), and inattention to it is a
common source of fallacious sociological thinking.




It is also worth noting that the action-theoretic level of analysis,
with its focus upon the intentional states of the agent, can generate
considerable mischief when combined haphazardly with evolutionary
reasoning. The most common fallacy arises when theorists treat the
"self-interest" of the individual, defined with respect to
his or her preferences, as a stand-in for the "fitness" of
a particular behavior (or phenotype), at either the biological or the
cultural level, then assumes that there is some selection mechanism in
place, again at either the biological or cultural level, that will
weed out forms of behavior that fail to advance the individual's
self-interest. The problem is that neither biological nor cultural
evolution function in this way. It is an elementary consequence of
"selfish gene" theory that biological evolution does not
advance the interests of the agent (the most conspicuous example being
inclusive fitness). For similar reasons, cultural evolution benefits
the "meme" rather than the interests of the agent
(Stanovich 2004). Thus the evolutionary perspective imposes a much
greater break with the rationality-based perspective than many social
theorists appreciate. Thus methodological individualism can sometimes
impede the sort of radical objectivation of social phenomena that the
use of certain sociotheoretic models or tools requires.