It is generally recognized that descriptive and normative individualism are logically independent theses. This paper defends the stronger view that recognition of the falsehood of descriptive individualism is crucial to understanding the evolutionary and developmental basis of normative individualism. The argument given for this is not analytic; rather, it is based on empirical generalizations ...

1. Introduction Over the last 50 years, the theory of rational choice has emerged as the dominant paradigm of quantitative research in the social and economic sciences. The idea that individuals make choices by rationally weighing values and uncertainties (or that they ought to, or at least act as if they do) is central to Bayesian methods of statistical inference and decision analysis; the the...

We critically review the methodological practices of two research programs which are jointly called ‘neuroeconomics’. We defend the first of these, termed ‘neurocellular economics’ (NE) by Ross (2008), from an attack on its relevance by Gul and Pesendorfer (2008) (GP). This attack arbitrarily singles out some but not all processing variables as unimportant to economics, is insensitive to the re...

Dyslexia is treated by many specialists as a cognitive impairment involving visual attention deficit. It may cause an image of letter rotation or overlapping. Both children and adults suffer from this disease, differing in individual needs and seriousness. With a growing amount of information being distributed digitally, there is a need to accommodate online text to dyslexic users. However, wit...

Group-level cognitive states are widely observed in human social systems, but their discussion is often ruled out a priori in quantitative approaches. In this paper, we show how reference to the irreducible mental states and psychological dynamics of a group is necessary to make sense of large scale social phenomena. We introduce the problem of mental boundaries by reference to a classic proble...

Over the past decade, the phenomenon of self-representation in civil cases has led to the development of programs designed to facilitate self-representation. A revitalized movement seeking to establish a civil right to counsel has emerged (civil Gideon, a civil right to counsel based on Gideon v. Wainwright), pressing for the expansion of the availability of counsel for the poor. What are the s...

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 c...

In this short essay we respond to Jepperson and Meyer’s (2011) critique of “action theories” and methodological individualism in sociology. We highlight fundamental problems with their argument, notably their misconception of methodological individualism(s) and the belief that this explanatory principle ignores—and is somehow invalidated by—the complex, “emergent” and multi-level nature of soci...