This article discusses relations among the multiple levels of analysis present in macro-sociological explanation—i.e., relations of individual, structural, and institutional processes. It also criticizes the doctrinal insistence upon single-level individualistic explanation found in some prominent contemporary sociological theory. For illustrative material the article returns to intellectual uses of Weber's "Protestant Ethic thesis," showing how an artificial version has been employed as a kind of proof text for the alleged scientific necessity of individualist explanation. Our alternative exposition renders the discussion of (...) Protestantism and capitalism in an explicitly multilevel way, distinguishing possible individual-level, social-organizational, and institutional linkages. The causal processes involved are distinct ones, with the more structural and institutional forms neither captured nor attainable by individual-level thinking. We argue more generally that "methodological individualisms" confuse issues of explanation with issues about microfoundations. This persistent intellectual conflation may be rooted in the broader folk models of liberal individualism. (shrink)

We offer a new argument for the claim that there can be non-degenerate objective chance (“true randomness”) in a deterministic world. Using a formal model of the relationship between different levels of description of a system, we show how objective chance at a higher level can coexist with its absence at a lower level. Unlike previous arguments for the level-specificity of chance, our argument shows, in a precise sense, that higher-level chance does not collapse into epistemic probability, despite higher-level properties (...) supervening on lower-level ones. We show that the distinction between objective chance and epistemic probability can be drawn, and operationalized, at every level of description. There is, therefore, not a single distinction between objective and epistemic probability, but a family of such distinctions. (shrink)

Decision-making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals' causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments, and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explore the possibility of aggregating causal judgments independently of probabilistic ones. Formally, we introduce the problem of causal-network aggregation. (...) Finally, we revisit the aggregation of probabilistic judgments when this is constrained by prior aggregation of qualitative causal judgments. (shrink)

This article focuses on emergence in social systems. The author begins by proposing a new tool to explore the mechanisms of social emergence: multi agent–based computer simulation. He then draws on philosophy of mind to develop an account of social emergence that raises potential problems for the methodological individualism of both social mechanism and of multi agent simulation. He then draws on various complexity concepts to propose a set of criteria whereby one can determine whether a given social mechanism generates (...) emergent properties, in the sense that their explanation cannot be reduced to a mechanistic account of individuals and their interactions. This combined account helps to resolve the competing claims of methodological individualists and social realists. The author’s conclusion is that the scope of mechanistic explanation may be limited due to the extreme complexity of many social systems. Key Words: emergence • mechanism • computer simulation • methodological individualism • social realism. (shrink)

Understanding a normative concept like oppression requires attention to not only its harms but also the causes of those harms. In other words, a complete understanding of such a concept requires a proper causal explanation. This causal explanation can also inform and constrain our moral response to such harms. Therefore, the conceptual explanatory framework that we use to inform our moral diagnosis and our moral response become significant. The first goal of this dissertation is to propose complexity theory as the (...) proper framework for not only explaining a social phenomenon like oppression but also understanding the proper sites for social change. The second goal of this dissertation is to answer three interrelated questions about how we should respond, morally, to a chronic and complex social problem like racial or gender inequality: (1) Why do the current interventions to address these problems fail? (2) Do social movements play any unique role in addressing these problems? (3) What is our individual responsibility to participate in social movements? In response, I argue that the explanatory frameworks that we choose to understand the cause(s) of social problems can be the source of the inadequacy of our intervention. I argue that a proper social and moral intervention needs to capture the complex and dynamic nature of the social world. I also show that changing the explanatory framework allows us to see the unique role social movements play in making effective and sustainable social change possible. Finally, I conclude supporting such movements is a moral imperative. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And (...) what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? (4) Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? Although I use the terminology of “levels”, the proposed framework can also represent “scales”, “domains”, or “subject matters”, where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible, distributed cognitive systems is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory. The motivation for this novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST (...) can deliver two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists’ threat of epiphenomenalism, while being well in line with materialism. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the analysis of the relations between different levels of reality. The core argument is based on considerations of both an epistemology of action and manipulative causality as a criterion of object identity. The argumentation is extended towards the concepts of self-organization and self-regulation. Finally, several views on reduction and the problems of emergence and complexity are discussed.

This paper offers a comparison of three different kinds of collective attitudes: aggregate, common, and corporate attitudes. They differ not only in their relationship to individual attitudes—e.g., whether they are “reducible” to individual attitudes—but also in the roles they play in relation to the collectives to which they are ascribed. The failure to distinguish them can lead to confusion, in informal talk as well as in the social sciences. So, the paper’s message is an appeal for disambiguation.

I explore a type of computational social simulation known as artificial societies. Artificial society simulations are dynamic models of real-world social phenomena. I explore the role that these simulations play in social explanation, by situating these simulations within contemporary philosophical work on explanation and on models. Many contemporary philosophers have argued that models provide causal explanations in science, and that models are necessary mediators between theory and data. I argue that artificial society simulations provide causal mechanistic explanations. I conclude that (...) in their current form, these simulations are based on methodologically individualist assumptions that could limit their potential scope of social explanation. (shrink)

Jens Greve has accurately summarized nonreductive individualism (NRI) and has made an important contribution to an ongoing discussion concerning individualism, reductionism, and emergentism. Greve’s primary criticism is of my account of downward causation, and he cites Kim’s critique of Fodor by analogy. I argue that my original paper already addressed Kim’s critique, by drawing on other philosophers of mind that Greve does not engage with, to make an argument for downward causation based on wild disjunction. Further, I argue that Greve (...) does not successfully make the case that the issue of the autonomy of the mental level is distinct from the autonomy of the social level. As empirical examples of irreducible emergent group properties, I cite studies of improvisational theater dialogues, and studies of social networks. (shrink)

Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations depend on their members (...) for their existence, but the members of an organization can be where the organization is not. The designated office of an organization, however, need be little more than a mailbox. I argue that the problem can be solved by conceptualizing the relation between social entities and non-social entities as one of constitution, a relation of unity without identity. Constituted objects have properties that cannot be reduced to properties of the constituting objects. Thus, my attempt to solve the Location Problem results in an argument in favor of a kind of non-reductive materialism about the social. (shrink)

In grappling with the micro-macro problem in sociology, philosophers of the field are finding it increasingly useful to associate micro-sociology with theory reduction. In this article I argue that the association is ungrounded and undesirable. Although of a reductive "disposition," micro-sociological theories instantiate something more like "reductive explanation," whereby the causal roles of social wholes are explained in terms of their psychological parts. In this form, micro-sociological theories may actually have a better shot at closing the sociology–psychology explanatory gap, and (...) resist many antireductionist arguments, including the well-known argument from "multiple realization.". (shrink)

After decades of postcolonial development planning in the former colonies of Africa, one question that has been asked over and over again concerns how much has changed in Africa since the launch of what used to be called the first, second, third and other development decades. There is no doubt that national development policies and plans have played significant roles in influencing the direction of the post-political-independence development processes in Africa. This paper argues, however, that far more serious attention needs (...) to be paid by the African public to the important contributions that the nature of their development plans can make in the transformations of their lives. This paper uses development plans as an exemplar of social mechanisms in critical realist philosophy and argues that the development planning authorities in Africa need to take seriously the nature of the relations between their ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ sectors in the formulation and implementation of their development plans. (shrink)

Recently there has been a rise in the application of concepts and methods from biological evolutionary theory to human cultures and societies where the aim is to explain these by describing them as population-level phenomena reducible to individual-level processes. I argue against this type of view by using Mesoudi's Cultural Evolution as a case study. I claim that Mesoudi’s ontological assumptions about cultures and societies are dubious and his methodological assumptions inadequate when it comes to addressing cultural and social phenomena. (...) A consequence is that this approach to studying culture is, at the very least, incomplete and of limited application. (shrink)

Methodological individualists often claim that any social phenomenon can ultimately be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. Any Nagelian version of methodological individualism requires that there be bridge laws that translate social statements into individualistic ones. We show that Nagelian individualism can be put to logical scrutiny by making the relevant social and individualistic languages fully explicit and mathematically precise. In particular, we prove that the social statement that a group of (at least two) agents performs (...) a deontically admissible group action cannot be expressed in a well-established deontic logic of agency that models every combination of actions, omissions, abilities, and obligations of finitely many individual agents. (shrink)

This article critiques R. Keith Sawyer’s theory of social causation from his 2005 book Social Emergence. It considers his use of analogy with the philosophy of mind, his account of individual agency, the legacy of Emile Durkheim, the concepts of supervenience, multiple realization, and wild disjunction, and the role of history in social causation. Sawyer’s theory is also evaluated in terms of two examples of empirical research: his own micro-sociological studies into group creativity; and Margaret Archer’s macro-sociology of education systems.

It is currently common to conceive of the classic methodological individualism–holism debate in level terms. Accordingly, the dispute is taken to concern the proper level of explanations in the social sciences. In this paper, I argue that the debate is not apt to be characterized in level terms. The reason is that widely adopted notions of individualist explanations do not qualify as individual-level explanations because they span multiple levels. I defend this claim relative to supervenience, emergence, and other accounts of (...) the social world as levelled. Moreover, I discuss the consequences of this finding for the ongoing methodological individualism–holism debate. (shrink)

A prominent way of explaining how race is socially constructed appeals to social positions and social structures. On this view, the construction of a person’s race is understood in terms of the person occupying a certain social position in a social structure. The aim of this paper is to give a metaphysically perspicuous account of this form of race construction. Analogous to functionalism about mental states, I develop an account of a ‘race structure’ in which various races (Black, White, Asian, (...) etc.) are functionally defined social positions. Individual persons occupy these social positions by ‘playing the role’ characteristic of those positions. The properties by which a person plays a race role, are the realizers for one’s race. I characterize the social construction of a person’s race in terms of a realization relation that satisfies a ‘subset’ condition on the social powers of raced persons. Races, on this view, are functionally defined, multiply realizable social kinds. The final section of the paper outlines some explanatory benefits of the account. (shrink)

Many existing defenses of group rights seem to rely on the notion of group freedom. To date, however, no adequate analysis of this notion has been offered. Group freedom is best understood in terms of processes of social categorization that are embedded in social mechanisms. Such processes often give rise to group-specific constraints and enablements. On the proposed social mechanism account, group rights are demands for group freedom. Even so, group rights often serve to eradicate individual unfreedom. Furthermore, generic measures (...) sometimes provide the most appropriate solution to a problem of group unfreedom. (shrink)

According to Sosa, knowledge is apt belief, where a belief is apt when accurate because adroit. Sosa :465–475, 2010; Judgment and agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) adds to his triple-A analysis of knowledge, a triple-S analysis of competence, where a complete competence combines its seat, shape and situation. Much of Sosa’s influential work assumes that epistemic agents are individuals who acquire knowledge when they hit the truth through exercising their own individual skills in appropriate shapes and situations. This paper (...) explores an extension of Sosa’s framework to a social setting in which groups constitute epistemic agents over and above their individual members. The claim is that groups can be ascribed knowledge in virtue of hitting the truth through exercising their competences in appropriate shapes and situations. While knowledge at the collective level may diverge from knowledge at the individual level, the competences of groups are nothing over and above the combined competences of their members. The ensuing view thus has implications for the debate over reduction and supervenience in collective epistemology. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. This paper presents a framework for studying levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and discuss several applications, some of which refer to descriptive or explanatory levels while others refer to ontological levels. I illustrate the usefulness of this framework by bringing it to bear on some familiar philosophical questions. Is there a hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the (...) bottom? And what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? Are there emergent higher-level properties? Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? And might a levelled framework shed light on the relationship between third-personal and first-personal phenomena? (shrink)

Philosophers of the social sciences are increasingly convinced that macro-and micro-explanations are complementary. Whereas macro-explanations are broad, micro-explanations are deep. I distinguish between weak and strong complementarity: Strongly complementary explanations improve one another when integrated, weakly complementary explanations do not. To demonstrate the explanatory autonomy of different levels of explanation, explanatory pluralists mostly presuppose the weak form of complementarity. By scrutinizing the notions of explanatory depth and breadth, I argue that macro- and micro-accounts of the same phenomenon are more often (...) strongly complementary. This invites a revision of the pluralist position in which integration promotes explanatory progress. (shrink)

The emergentist position that R. Keith Sawyer has formulated, nonreductive individualism, contains three propositions. First, that social characteristics must always be realized in individuals; second, that it is nevertheless possible to understand social properties as irreducible; and third, that therefore it is possible to demonstrate how social properties are able to exercise independent causal influences on individuals and their properties. It is demonstrated that Sawyer is not able to meet an objection that Kim has formulated against the analogous position in (...) the philosophy of mind. In his defense of the claim of irreducibility Sawyer refers to Fodor’s argument about multiple realizability, but this line of argument cannot preserve the claim for downward causation because Fodor’s claim for irreducibility rests on assumptions that are not compatible with a systematic formulation of downward causation. The article proposes a reading of Fodor’s argument that is consistent with individualism but not with nonreductive individualism. (shrink)

Philosophers of the social sciences are increasingly convinced that macro-and micro-explanations are complementary. Whereas macro-explanations are broad, micro-explanations are deep. I distinguish between weak and strong complementarity: Strongly complementary explanations improve one another when integrated, weakly complementary explanations do not. To demonstrate the explanatory autonomy of different levels of explanation, explanatory pluralists mostly presuppose the weak form of complementarity. By scrutinizing the notions of explanatory depth and breadth, I argue that macro- and micro-accounts of the same phenomenon are more often (...) strongly complementary. This invites a revision of the pluralist position in which integration promotes explanatory progress. Key Words: explanatory pluralism • social science • explanatory depth • explanatory breadth • mechanism. (shrink)

This article argues that empirical social scientists can be freed from having to account for “micro-to-macro transitions.” The article shows, in opposition to the (still) dominant perspective based on Coleman’s macro-micro-macro model, that no micro-macro transitions or mechanisms connect the individual level to the macro level in empirical social science. Rather, when considering that social macro entities and properties are micro manifest rather than macro manifest, it becomes clear that the micro-macro move in empirical social science is purely conceptual or (...) analytical. (shrink)

This article argues that the tradition within the individualism-holism debate of importing arguments from the micro–macro discussion in other disciplines significantly has hampered our understanding of the “individual-social” relationship. While, for example, the “neural-mental” and “atomic-molecular” links represent empirical “gives rise to” relationships, in the social sciences the micro–macro link is a purely analytical “qualifies as” type of relationship. This disanalogy is important, since it has significant implications for the individualism-holism debate: it implies a phenomenally monist social ontology and it (...) disqualifies the notion of social macro causation. (shrink)

Popper’s theory of World 3 is often regarded as incongruent with his defense of methodological individualism. This article criticizes this widespread view. Methodological individualism is said to be at odds with three crucial assumptions of the theory of World 3: the impossibility of reducing World 3 to subjective mental states because it exists objectively, the view that the mental functions cannot be explained by assuming that individuals are isolated atoms, and the idea that World 3 has causal power and influences (...) both individual minds and actions. This article demonstrates that the inconsistency thesis stems from a confusion between methodological individualism as understood by Popper and reductionism. The reasons for this confusion are analyzed and clarified. It is argued that two variants of methodological individualism can be distinguished, and that unlike psychologistic individualism, Popper’s nonatomistic individualism is fully consistent with his theory of World 3. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the account of emergence advanced by Broad is both defensible and applicable to some examples of group-level phenomena. Specifically, Broad’s account enables the formulation of a non-reductive physicalism or of a non-reductive individualism, and correctly describes the case of group-judgment under the conditions of the discursive dilemma. Furthermore, this analysis shows that emergent phenomena need not be characterised using the resources of complexity theory.

This article focuses on emergence in social systems. The author begins by proposing a new tool to explore the mechanisms of social emergence: multi agent–based computer simulation. He then draws on philosophy of mind to develop an account of social emergence that raises potential problems for the methodological individualism of both social mechanism and of multi agent simulation. He then draws on various complexity concepts to propose a set of criteria whereby one can determine whether a given social mechanism generates (...) emergent properties, in the sense that their explanation cannot be reduced to a mechanistic account of individuals and their interactions. This combined account helps to resolve the competing claims of methodological individualists and social realists. The author’s conclusion is that the scope of mechanistic explanation may be limited due to the extreme complexity of many social systems. (shrink)

Commenting on recent articles by Keith Sawyer and Julie Zahle, the author questions the way in which the debate between methodological individualists and holists has been presented and contends that too much weight has been given to metaphysical and ontological debates at the expense of giving attention to methodological debates and analysis of good explanatory practice. Giving more attention to successful explanatory practice in the social sciences and the different underlying epistemic interests and motivations for providing explanations or reducing theories (...) (which ask for different kinds of explanatory information to be found on the social or on the individual level) might lead to real progress in the debate on methodological individualism, and away from the unending battles of (metaphysical) intuitions. Key Words: methodological individualism • nonreductive materialism • pluralism • pragmatics of explanation. (shrink)

Giorgos Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou have written a deeply theoretical book arguing that we should see reconstructive biographical research as a method for constructing causal accounts of soc...

A central argument for non-reductive accounts of group agency is that complex social entities are capable of exerting causal influence independently of and superseding the causal efficacy of the individuals constituting them. A prominent counter is that non-reductionists run into an insuperable dilemma between identity and redundancy – with identity undermining independent higher-level efficacy and redundancy leading to overdetermination or exclusion. This paper argues that critics of non-reductionism can manage with a simpler and more persuasive reductio strategy called mapping: allow (...) that group agents are causally efficacious in their own right and chart how their causal efficacy is carried out; how it relates to the causal efficacy of individual determiners; how it connects to the causal relevance of background structural factors. The focus exclusively on whether groups are or are not causally efficacious black-boxes implementation, while close attention to how causation is wired increases the visibility of individualist arguments and countenances structure-oriented explanations. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lower-level individualistic science. The standard argument for this position is the Fodorian multiple realizability argument. Its defenders endorse token–token identities between “higher-level” social objects and pluralities/sums of “lower-level” individuals, but they maintain that the properties expressed by social science predicates are often multiply realizable, entailing that type–type identities between social and individualistic properties are ruled out. In this paper I argue that the multiple realizability argument for explanatory (...) holism is unsound. The social sciences are indeed irreducible, but the principled reason for this is that the required token–token identifications cannot in general be carried through. In consequence, paradigmatic social science predicates cannot be taken to apply to the objects quantified over in the lower-level sciences. The result is that typical social science predicates cannot even be held to be co-extensive with individualistic predicates, which means type–type identifications are ruled out too. Multiple realizability has nothing to do with this failure of co-extensiveness, because the relevant social science predicates are not multiply realized in the sense intended by the explanatory holists, a sense which presupposes reductive token–token identifications. (shrink)

In recent decades, a number of authors have relied on the multiple realizability argument to reject methodological individualism. In this article, I argue that this strategy results in serious difficulties and makes it impossible to identify social entities and phenomena.

In a recent paper on realism and pragmatism published in this journal, Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen have been pleading for more methodological work in the philosophy of the social sciences—refining the conceptual tools of social scientists—and less philosophically ontological theories. Following this de-ontologizing approach, we scrutinize the debates on social explanation and contribute to the development of a pragmatic social science methodology. Analyzing four classic debates concerning explanation in the social sciences, we propose to shift the debate away from (...) (a) the ontologizing defenses of forms of social explanation, and (b) a winner-takes-all-approach. Instead, we advocate (c) a pragmatic approach towards social explanation, elaborating a rigorous framework for explanatory pluralism detached from the debates on social ontology. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss two prominent views on the relevance and irrelevance of ontological investigations for the social sciences, namely, ontological foundationalism and anti-ontological pragmatism. I will argue that both views are unsatisfactory. The subsequent part of the article will introduce an alternative role for ontological projects in the philosophy of the social sciences that fares better in this respect by paying attention to the ontological assumptions of actual social scientific theories, models, and related explanatory practices. I will (...) illustrate and support this alternative through discussion of three concrete cases. (shrink)