Interrogations #5 10/6/2004 Methodological Individualism 1. Matt Nichter

The multiple realizability of macro-level types does not, in my opinion, prove that “the explanations provided by the macro-theory [in which such types occur] will not, EVEN IN PRINCIPLE, be reducible to a micro-account” (Reconstructing Marxism, p. 120, my emphasis). For multiply-realizable macro-level types may be reducible to highly-complex disjunctions of micro-level types. (Indeed in such cases the complex, disjunctive character of the reduction would be precisely what explains the multiple realizability of the macro-level type.) Though successful reductions may take the form of an identification of a single macro-type with a single micro-type (e.g. ‘water = H2O’), they need not be so simple. That said, I’m willing to bet a kidney that neither fitness, nor profitability, nor the aggregate rate of unemployment, nor the vast majority of social-scientific concepts can, in fact, be identified with disjunctions of micro-level types, however complex. In other words, I believe that methodological individualism, in the form defended by Elster, is clearly false. But, to reiterate, I don’t believe it is false merely as a result of the fact that multiply realizable macro-level types exist. Whether or not these multiply-realizable macro-level types are reducible to some complex disjunction of micro-types is itself an empirical question. [I am not sure if I can fully articulate my hesitation with your formulation. It is hard to imagine precisely what it would mean to say that a concept like “fitness” could be reduced to some highly complex set of disjunctions. What would that mean? We can make explanatory statements about fitness, in which fitness constitutes a real mechanism that explains things about evolution. I don’t really understand what it would mean to replace that simple claim with the virtually infinite number of micro-reductions of each-and-every instance of fitness. Perhaps you can explain this more clearly in class.]