No abstract
The significance of methodological individualism (MI) in social science is one of the most classical issues in the philosophy of social science. Nowadays it is customary to set it in opposition to methodological holism, although this expression (introduced by Watkins, 1952) is much less common than "holism", which might be much more appropriate. This has replaced the notion of "collectivism", which was sometimes used in the middle of the 20 th century (O"Neill, 1973); but this notion was still much more misleading. Not only did it carry a possible political meaning but also because political concerns were really core elements of certain viewpoints (notably Popper, 1945 andHayek, 1988), despite there being no logical link between the epistemological and the political issues. 1 I shall however leave aside here this political dimension.I claim that what is at stake, generally speaking, when one speaks of "holism" is a complex and confused intuition that might not still have been completely exhausted by advocates of analytic methods, more than a specific methodology, but such that its specificity is constantly reduced as analytic methods are becoming more and more integrative. 2 Certain important issues are currently tackled without specific reference to the notion of holism (a fortiori collectivism), such as many debates on collective behavior, collective action, collective agency, collective intentionality, etc. However the main issues are basically the same: to what extent is collective action proper understood not only (that means: is not reducible to) a mere sum of individual actions?And how can collective action properly understood result or emerge from these individual actions? In this specific context, discussions are focused just on action and the dynamic aspects of social life more than discussions about holism are (those notably include an analysis of collective beliefs not specifically oriented towards action). In other words, the question is to know whether there is an ontological specificity of a certain kind of collective action compared to individual action, such that its account would require a proper concept: the concept of collective agency.
The issue of knowing what it means for a group to have collective beliefs is being discussed more and more in contemporary philosophy of the social sciences and philosophy of mind. Margaret Gilbert’s reconsideration of Durkheim’s viewpoint in the framework of the plural subject’s account is one of the most famous. This has implications in the history and the sociology of science—as well asin the history and sociology of philosophy—although Gilbert only outlined them in the former fields and said nothing about the latter. Symmetrically but independently, a historian of science, Mara Beller, has recently challenged Kuhn’s conception of the role of consensus in sciences in a brilliant analysis by carefully studying the history of Copenhagen School of Quantum Mechanics. Not only does she show the role of disagreement and controversies (doubting whether there was any collective belief characteristic in this group of physicists), but she even shakes up the very idea of individual beliefs. Each scientist (Heisenberg, Bohr, etc.) could be seen as divided into several selves. This paper contends that these two conceptions open important new horizons in several domains, especially if they are linked together. The paper assesses this claim in the light of empirical examples like the Vienna Circle, Copenhagen School, and, eventually, Cartesian philosophy.
LES PARALOGISMES D'UN POINT DE VUE SOCIOLOGIQUEPareto écrit dans un passage célèbre du Traité de sociologie générale : « La logique cherche pourquoi un raisonnement est erroné, la sociologie pourquoi il obtient un consentement fréquent 1 ». Le contexte immédiat du passage montre que c'est plus particulièrement au Système de logique de Mill, qui comporte un livre (Tome II, Livre V) sur les sophismes («fallacies »), que Pareto pensait. C'est à évaluer la signification de cet aphorisme programmatique et la portée de cette référence de Pareto à Mill que sera consacré cet article. Différentes recherches se développent en effet actuellement sur les erreurs de raisonnement ou les paralogismes (nous prendrons provisoirement comme synonymes ces deux expressions ainsi que celle de sophisme), tant du côté de la psychologie cognitive et des théories de l'argumentation que de la sociologie. Ainsi, en psychologie cognitive, Tversky et Kahneman ont inauguré un nouveau champ de recherches que poursuivent des auteurs comme Nisbett et Ross (1980) 16, 1995
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