Is Multiple Realizability a Valid Argument against Methodological Individualism?

Is Methodological Individualism a Reductionist Approach?

Meanings of Methodological Individualism

Advocacy of ‘methodological individualism’ is a widespread, especially among economists. However, the term is rarely defined with adequate precision and some crucial ambiguities are explored in this article. Among these is the commonplace ambivalence over whether explanations should be in terms of individuals alone, or in terms of individuals plus relations between them. It is shown that a grea...

Methodological Individualism and Generosity

Today a convergence between the fields of anthropology and economics has re-emerged after decades during which the dictates of methodological individualism, as strikingly elucidated by Kenneth Arrow, had seriously limited and hampered effective scholarship in studies of economic and social development in developing countries. A new generation of development economists represented by Spolaori an...

Is Multiple Realizability Compatible With Antireductionism?

In a rich and provocative paper, Jaegwon Kim offers an ingenious argument for psychophysical reductionism. I take Kim to be posing a dilemma for anyone who would deny reductionism, viz. that one must either advocate the wholesale reduction of psychology to physical science or one must advocate the sundering of psychology into distinct fields, each one of which is reducible to physical science. ...

Levels of Selection and Methodological Individualism

Whitman argues that group selection is consistent with methodological individualism. He begins by defining a weak form of methodological individualism in which agents are not necessarily self-interested or rational and shows that this form of is consistent with Sober and Wilson’s model of group selection. However, Sober and Wilson’s group selection is also consistent with a methodological indiv...