The Individualism-Holism Debate on Intertheoretic Reduction and the Argument from Multiple Realization

Zahle, Julie

doi:10.1177/0048393102250306

Cited by 34 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(37 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The irreducibility of social objects and properties has consequences for the explanation of social facts or events. According to methodological individualism, all social facts or events can be (or are best) explained in terms of facts or events concerning individuals (and physical objects) and their properties (Watkins 1952;Sawyer 2002Sawyer , 2003Zahle 2003). The irreducibility of social objects and properties, I shall argue in Sect.…”

Section: Ontological and Methodological Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given that it is a form of ontological individualism, one might expect it to entail methodological individualism. This is the thesis that all social facts or events can be (or are best) explained in terms of facts or events concerning individuals (and physical objects) and their properties (Watkins 1952;Sawyer 2002Sawyer , 2003Zahle 2003). If this thesis is true, any social fact or event can in principle be explained without invoking social objects or properties.…”

Section: Methodological Holismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 MacDonald and Pettit (1981), Mellor (1982), Currie (1984), and Kincaid (1986) Little (1991), Tuomela (1995), Sawyer (2002), and Zahle (2003) defend supervenience of social properties on individual properties. 3 See Epstein (2009, p. 188).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The location problem in social ontology

Hindriks

2011

Synthese

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations depend on their members for their existence, but the members of an organization can be where the organization is not. The designated office of an organization, however, need be little more than a mailbox. I argue that the problem can be solved by conceptualizing the relation between social entities and non-social entities as one of constitution, a relation of unity without identity. Constituted objects have properties that cannot be reduced to properties of the constituting objects. Thus, my attempt to solve the Location Problem results in an argument in favor of a kind of non-reductive materialism about the social.Keywords Constitution · Constitutive rule · Location · Organization · Non-reductive individualism · Normative power · Social ontology · Status Mathematical, mental, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview. Mathematical entities present an ontological puzzle to philosophers because they are abstract. How the relation between mental and physical properties should be conceptualized is complicated by qualia because of their inherently subjective phenomenology. And the moral domain resists reduction, many believe,

show abstract

Section: Ontological and Methodological Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodological Holismmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The location problem in social ontology

Hindriks

2011

Synthese

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…All the more so, if it is true, as is frequently claimed (see, for example, Kincaid 1986;Zahle 2003;List & Menzies 2010), that most collective (and social) properties are indeed multiply realizable. The final point I want to make, however, is that the situation is even less encouraging for the responsibility-collectivist when higher-order and lower-order properties are not in competition for causal efficacy.…”

Section: Causal Group-control and The Problem Of Exclusionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Collective Responsibility and Group-Control

Szigeti

2014

Synthese Library

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Collectives are more or less structured groups of human beings. Responsibilitycollectivism is the view that the moral responsibility of at least some such collectives is something over and above the combined moral responsibility of individual group members. This paper focuses on one of the key conditions of responsibility: the requirement of control. It is plausible that this requirement also applies to collective agents and so collective responsibility presupposes group-control. Responsibilitycollectivists have often tried to unpack the idea of group-control as non-causal control. I argue that non-causal control is not an admissible basis for attributing responsibility. Only causal group-control is. This is because non-causal group control does not provide the right kind of information regarding the ancestry of a certain outcome. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the difficulties which arise for responsibility-collectivism if one understands group-control as causal group-control. One of these difficulties is whether causal group-control is consistent with ontological individualism. The second concerns the relationship of group-control and individual control. I argue that the first difficulty is manageable, but only at the price of having to accept a solution to the second difficulty which runs counter to the original aim of the responsibility-collectivist of characterizing irreducible collective responsibility as compatible with individual responsibility. Worse still, responsibility-collectivists may have to choose sides in other areas of social ontology as well. This further raises the price of this position.2

show abstract

“…In the next three sections I will argue-against both Fodorian explanatory holists and explanatory individualists (see Zahle 2003 for a fairly recent defense of explanatory individualism)-that bridge principles expressing token-token identities between social objects (as they are now described in social sciences) and pluralities or sums of interrelated individuals must be rejected. Since explanatory individualists and Fodorian explanatory holists alike endorse reductive token-token identities between social and individualistic objects, I will refer to them all as Social Object Reductionists or SORs.…”

Section: And T = T (Where [… … …] Is An Event X(y) Is An Object Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why the social sciences are irreducible

Wahlberg

2017

Synthese

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lowerlevel individualistic science. The standard argument for this position (usually labelled explanatory holism) is the Fodorian multiple realizability argument. Its defenders endorse token-token(s) identities between "higher-level" social objects and pluralities/sums of "lower-level" individuals (a position traditionally called ontological individualism), but they maintain that the properties expressed by social science predicates are often multiply realizable, entailing that type-type identities between social and individualistic properties are ruled out. In this paper I argue that the multiple realizability argument for explanatory holism is unsound. The social sciences are indeed irreducible, but the principled reason for this is that the required token-token(s) identifications cannot in general be carried through. In consequence, paradigmatic social science predicates cannot be taken to apply to the objects quantified over in the lowerlevel sciences. The result is that typical social science predicates cannot even be held to be co-extensive with individualistic predicates, which means type-type identifications are ruled out too. Multiple realizability has nothing to do with this failure of co-extensiveness, because the relevant social science predicates are not multiply realized in the sense intended by the explanatory holists, a sense which presupposes reductive token-token(s) identifications.

show abstract

The Individualism-Holism Debate on Intertheoretic Reduction and the Argument from Multiple Realization

Cited by 34 publications

References 26 publications

The location problem in social ontology

The location problem in social ontology

Collective Responsibility and Group-Control

Why the social sciences are irreducible

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About