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Complex Methodological Individualism

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Abstract

This chapter contextualizes the question of Methodological Individualism (MI) in the social sciences into a broader and more general scientific context including physical, biological, and ethological sciences. This approach closely links MI with the sciences of complexity, hence the denomination of complex methodological individualism (CMI). Many other chapters of the Handbook deal with the strictly social, political, economic, cultural, and institutional aspects of MI, as well as with the difficult epistemological problems they raise in the humanities. The focus here is on the contrary on the intrinsically transdisciplinary and transversal character of CMI. CMI concerns here the emergence of global collective properties (structures, organizations, processes) at the macroscopic level in populations composed at the microscopic level of a very large number of elementary individuals interacting with each other.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It dates back to Antiquity.

  2. 2.

    T and P are intensive magnitudes, while V is an extensive magnitude.

  3. 3.

    At the molecular level, a liquid to gas phase transition is an incredibly dramatic revolution: all the links giving to the liquid its cohesiveness are suddenly broken and the collective state becomes a dispersed state of “atomic” independent units.

  4. 4.

    Remember the chemical revolution resulting from the celebrated controversy on Oxygen and the atomic composition of water between Joseph Priestley and Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier (1779).

  5. 5.

    See e.g. Petitot, 2010.

  6. 6.

    See Vanberg, 1986.

  7. 7.

    For example, the billion euros Human Brain Project, which aims to simulate cortical modules of the visual cortex. It uses a computational power up to a million teraflops (a teraflop is 1000 billions operations per second).

  8. 8.

    See Jean-Pierre Dupuy's book The Mechanization of Mind.

  9. 9.

    They all emphasize the importance of this early contribution of Hayek to the neurophysiology of psychology.

  10. 10.

    See Petitot, 2008.

  11. 11.

    See, e.g., works by Jean-Louis Denebourg, Guy Theraulaz, Eric Bonabeau, or Bernard Manderick.

  12. 12.

    For a critique of Hamilton’s inclusive fitness, see Nowak, Tarnita, Wilson 2010.

  13. 13.

    Mandeville was from a family of liberal-progressive physicians of Rotterdam who emigrated to England following conflicts with the Orange Party and Calvinists.

  14. 14.

    See his Essais de morale, 1671.

  15. 15.

    See, e.g., Faccarello, 2006.

  16. 16.

    Here, “transcendence” means incommensurability and emergence.

  17. 17.

    In News Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas.

  18. 18.

    See e.g. Nemo, 2002.

  19. 19.

    Evident examples of such orders are language, law and morals: they are not natural in the strict sense of the term, but neither are they artificial since nobody has ever made them.

  20. 20.

    Ferguson. An Essay on the History of Civil Society.

  21. 21.

    Faccarello, 2006.

  22. 22.

    See the (Modèles formels de la ‘main invisible’: de Hayek à la théorie des jeux évolutionniste) “Formal models of the ‘invisible hand’. From Hayek to evolutionary game theory”, (Histoire du libéralisme en Europe) The History of Liberalism in Europe. See also Petitot, 2016, where fractal structures characteristic of phase transitions are computed for models of an iterated spatialized prisoner dilemma.

  23. 23.

    Birner, 2016.

  24. 24.

    For Kant, a normative judgement is “categorical” when it is independent of any end. Categorical prescriptions are purely “procedural”.

  25. 25.

    For Kant, a normative judgement is “hypothetical” when it is conditioned by an end and prescribes means to achieve the end (consequentialism).

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  1. Mathematics, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

    Jean Petitot

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    Nathalie Bulle

  2. Nankai University, Tianjin, China

    Francesco Di Iorio

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Petitot, J. (2023). Complex Methodological Individualism. In: Bulle, N., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41512-8_19

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