Abstract
After opening with some metaphilosophical preliminaries sketching a naturalist framework that guides the paper, I devote my discussion to identifying dead and live issues in the traditional individualism-holism debate. The third section discusses standard reductionist theses about theory reduction. Arguments given for and against such claims has been conceptual in nature and thus to my mind misguided. However, the empirical evidence against reducibility now seems overwhelming. More dead ends will be the topic of the fourth section, where I will discuss claims that society does not exist and claims that social mechanisms require accounts in terms of individuals. In the last Section I look at numerous places in the social sciences where there are interesting open issues around the individualism-holism controversy. Those issues are about how holist or individualist we must or can be in senses I specify. The live issues in the individualism-holism debate are not global ones to be decided on general conceptual grounds but local and contextual empirical debates about how far we can get by proceeding without institutional and social detail.
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Notes
- 1.
I refer to both organizations and institutions because these terms are used differently. Some think of institutions as just norms and norms as just regularities in behavior. I have in mind a richer (and I think more realistic) notion of an institution.
- 2.
Thanks to Don Ross for noting the difference between folk psychological notions of character and more scientific notions of personality.
- 3.
See Guala (2012) for some of the issues.
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Acknowledgments
Finn Colin, Julie Zahle, and Don Ross made careful comments that much improved this paper.
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Kincaid, H. (2014). Dead Ends and Live Issues in the Individualism-Holism Debate. In: Zahle, J., Collin, F. (eds) Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Synthese Library, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05344-8_8
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