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Ontological individualism reconsidered

Synthese 166 (1):187-213 (2009)

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  1. Varieties of social explanation: an introduction to the philosophy of social science.Daniel Little - 1991 - Boulder: Westview Press.
    Professor Little presents an introduction to the philosophy of social science with an emphasis on the central forms of explanation in social science: rational-intentional, causal, functional, structural, materialist, statistical and interpretive. The book is very strong on recent developments, particularly in its treatment of rational choice theory, microfoundations for social explanation, the idea of supervenience, functionalism, and current discussions of relativism.Of special interest is Professor Little’s insight that, like the philosophy of natural science, the philosophy of social science can profit (...)
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  • Individualism and global supervenience.Gregory Currie - 1984 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35 (December):345-58.
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  • Preserving the principle of one object to a place: A novel account of the relations among objects, sorts, sortals, and persistence conditions.Michael B. Burke - 1994 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (3):591-624.
    This article offers a novel, conservative account of material constitution, one that incorporates sortal essentialism and features a theory of dominant sortals. It avoids coinciding objects, temporal parts, relativizations of identity, mereological essentialism, anti-essentialism, denials of the reality of the objects of our ordinary ontology, and other departures from the metaphysic implicit in ordinary ways of thinking. Defenses of the account against important objections are found in Burke 1997, 2003, and 2004, as well as in the often neglected six paragraphs (...)
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  • Shared intention.Michael E. Bratman - 1993 - Ethics 104 (1):97-113.
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  • Spatio-temporal coincidence and the grounding problem.Karen Bennett - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 118 (3):339-371.
    A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the 'grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. However, (...)
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  • Global supervenience and dependence.Karen Bennett - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (3):501-529.
    Two versions of global supervenience have recently been distinguished from each other. I introduce a third version, which is more likely what people had in mind all along. However, I argue that one of the three versions is equivalent to strong supervenience in every sense that matters, and that neither of the other two versions counts as a genuine determination relation. I conclude that global supervenience has little metaphysically distinctive value.
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  • Groups with minds of their own.Philip Pettit - 2011 - In Alvin I. Goldman & Dennis Whitcomb (eds.), Social Epistemology: Essential Readings. New York: Oxford University Press.
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  • Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon.Margaret Gilbert - 1990 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15 (1):1-14.
    The everyday concept of a social group is approached by examining the concept of going for a walk together, an example of doing something together, or "shared action". Two analyses requiring shared personal goals are rejected, since they fail to explain how people walking together have obligations and rights to appropriate behavior, and corresponding rights of rebuke. An alternative account is proposed: those who walk together must constitute the "plural subject" of a goal. The nature of plural subjecthood, the thesis (...)
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  • The Idea of a Social Science: And its Relation to Philosophy.Peter Winch - 1958 - New York: Routledge.
    First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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  • The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy.Peter Winch - 1958 - New York: Routledge.
    In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a full understanding of (...)
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  • The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy.Peter Winch - 1958 - New York: Routledge.
    In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a full understanding of (...)
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  • Theories of masses and problems of constitution.Dean W. Zimmerman - 1995 - Philosophical Review 104 (1):53-110.
    The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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  • The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy.Rollo Handy - 1960 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 21 (2):270-270.
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  • The two theses of methodological individualism.J. W. N. Watkins - 1958 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 9 (33):319.
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  • Methodological individualism: A reply.J. W. N. Watkins - 1955 - Philosophy of Science 22 (1):58-62.
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  • The supreme court and the supreme court justices: A metaphysical puzzle.Gabriel Uzquiano - 2004 - Noûs 38 (1):135–153.
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  • Collective action, supervenience, and constitution.Raimo Tuomela - 1989 - Synthese 80 (2):243 - 266.
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  • Varieties of supervenience.Robert Stalnaker - 1996 - Philosophical Perspectives 10:221-42.
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  • Subjects among other things.Ernest Sosa - 1987 - Philosophical Perspectives 1:155-187.
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  • Global supervenience and identity across times and worlds.Theodore Sider - 1999 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (4):913-937.
    The existence and importance of supervenience principles for identity across times and worlds have been noted, but insufficient attention has been paid to their precise nature. Such attention is repaid with philosophical dividends. The issues in the formulation of the supervenience principles are two. The first involves the relevant variety of supervenience: that variety is global, but there are in fact two versions of global supervenience that must be distinguished. The second involves the subject matter: the names “identity over time” (...)
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  • Global Supervenience, Coincident Entities and Anti-Individualism.Oron Shagrir - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 109 (2):171-196.
    Theodore Sider distinguishes two notions of global supervenience: strong global supervenience and weak global supervenience. He then discusses some applications to general metaphysical questions. Most interestingly, Sider employs the weak notion in order to undermine a familiar argument against coincident distinct entities. In what follows, I reexamine the two notions and distinguish them from a third, intermediate, notion (intermediate global supervenience). I argue that (a) weak global supervenience is not an adequate notion of dependence; (b) weak global supervenience does not (...)
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  • Methodological and epistemological individualism.K. J. Scott - 1960 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 11 (44):331-336.
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  • Nonreductive individualism: Part I—supervenience and wild disjunction.R. Keith Sawyer - 2002 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (4):537-559.
    The author draws on arguments from contemporary philosophy of mind to provide an argument for sociological collectivism. This argument for nonreductive individualism accepts that only individuals exist but rejects methodological individualism. In Part I, the author presents the argument for nonreductive individualism by working through the implications of supervenience, multiple realizability, and wild disjunction in some detail. In Part II, he extends the argument to provide a defense for social causal laws, and this account of social causation does not require (...)
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  • The metaphysics of the social world.David-Hillel Ruben - 1985 - London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
    A careful elaboration and defence of holism in the philosophy of the social sciences, with regard both to particulars and properties. The last chapter addresses the issue of the irreducibility of holistic explanation in the social sciences.
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  • Social objects.Anthony Quinton - 1976 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1):1-27.
    Anthony Quinton; I*—The Presidential Address: Social Objects, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 76, Issue 1, 1 June 1976, Pages 1–28, https://doi.
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  • I*—The Presidential Address: Social Objects.Anthony Quinton - 1976 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1):1-28.
    Anthony Quinton; I*—The Presidential Address: Social Objects, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 76, Issue 1, 1 June 1976, Pages 1–28, https://doi.
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  • The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics.Philip Pettit - unknown
    This book is in three sections, with two chapters in each. It begins with questions of psychology: questions to do with what it means to be an intentional agent and, in particular, what it means to be an agent with the capacity for thought. Having sketched an overall view of the intentional, thinking agent, it then goes on to explore the difference that social life makes to the mentality of such agents; in effect, it outlines a social ontology. And, having (...)
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  • The Reduction of Society.D. H. Mellor - 1982 - Philosophy 57 (219):51-75.
    How does the study of society relate to the study of the people it comprises? This longstanding question is partly one of method, but mainly one of fact, of how independent the objects of these two studies, societies and people, are. It is commonly put as a question of reduction, and I shall tackle it in that form: does sociology reduce in principle to individual psychology? I follow custom in calling the claim that it does ‘individualism’ and its denial ‘holism’.
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  • Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems.R. Keith Sawyer - 2005 - Cambridge University Press.
    Can we understand important social issues by studying individual personalities and decisions? Or are societies somehow more than the people in them? Sociologists have long believed that psychology can't explain what happens when people work together in complex modern societies. In contrast, most psychologists and economists believe that if we have an accurate theory of how individuals make choices and act on them, we can explain pretty much everything about social life. Social Emergence takes a new approach to these longstanding (...)
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  • Review of Daniel Little: Varieties of social explanation: an introduction to the philosophy of social science[REVIEW]Daniel Little - 1993 - Ethics 103 (2):404-406.
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  • Constitution and similarity.Kathrin Koslicki - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 117 (3):327-363.
    Whenever an object constitutes, makes up or composes another object, the objects in question share a striking number of properties. This paper is addressed to the question of what might account for the intimate relation and striking similarity between constitutionally related objects. According to my account, the similarities between constitutionally related objects are captured at least in part by means of a principle akin to that of strong supervenience. My paper addresses two main issues. First, I propose independently plausible principles (...)
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  • Reduction, explanation, and individualism.Harold Kincaid - 1986 - Philosophy of Science 53 (4):492-513.
    This paper contributes to the recently renewed debate over methodological individualism (MI) by carefully sorting out various individualist claims and by making use of recent work on reduction and explanation outside the social sciences. My major focus is on individualist claims about reduction and explanation. I argue that reductionist versions of MI fail for much the same reasons that mental predicates cannot be reduced to physical predicates and that attempts to establish reducibility by weakening the requirements for reduction also fail. (...)
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  • 'Strong' and 'global' supervenience revisited.Jaegwon Kim - 1987 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (December):315-26.
    THIS PAPER CORRECTS AN ERROR IN MY EARLIER PAPER, "CONCEPTS OF SUPERVENIENCE" ("PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH", VOLUME 45, 1984), AND PRESENTS FURTHER MATERIAL ON SUPERVENIENCE. THE ERROR IS THE CLAIM THAT "GLOBAL" SUPERVENIENCE ENTAILS "STRONG" SUPERVENIENCE. HOWEVER, IT IS ARGUED THAT THIS FAILURE OF ENTAILMENT ONLY GOES TO SHOW THE INADEQUACY OF GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE AS AN EXPLICATION OF "DEPENDENCY" OR "DETERMINATION" RELATION, AND, IN PARTICULAR, THAT MATERIALISM FORMULATED IN TERMS OF GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE APPEARS TOO WEAK. (IT IS POINTED OUT, AMONG (...)
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  • Concepts of supervenience.Jaegwon Kim - 1984 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (December):153-76.
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  • Nonreductive Individualism.Sawyer R. Keith - 2002 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (4):537-559.
    The author draws on arguments from contemporary philosophy of mind to provide an argument for sociological collectivism. This argument for nonreductive individualism accepts that only individuals exist but rejects methodological individualism. In Part I, the author presents the argument for nonreductive individualism by working through the implications of supervenience, multiple realizability, and wild disjunction in some detail. In Part II, he extends the argument to provide a defense for social causal laws, and this account of social causation does not require (...)
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  • Supervenience and Object-Dependant Properties.Thomas Hofweber - 2005 - Journal of Philosophy 102 (1):5-32.
    I argue that the semantic thesis of direct reference and the meta- physical thesis of the supervenience of the non-physical on the physical cannot both be true. The argument first develops a necessary condition for supervenience, a so-called conditional locality requirement, which is then shown to be incompatible with some physical object having object dependent properties, which in turn is required for the thesis of direct reference to be true. We apply this argument to formulate a new argument against the (...)
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  • The two theses of methodological individualism.Leon J. Goldstein - 1958 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 9 (33):1-11.
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  • The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy.Leon J. Goldstein - 1960 - Philosophical Review 69 (3):411.
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  • The inadequacy of the principle of methodological individualism.Leon J. Goldstein - 1956 - Journal of Philosophy 53 (25):801-813.
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  • Symposium: Explanations in History.E. A. Gellner & P. G. Lucas - 1956 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 30 (1):157 - 196.
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  • The non-identity of a material thing and its matter.Kit Fine - 2003 - Mind 112 (446):195-234.
    There is a well-known argument from Leibniz's Law for the view that coincident material things may be distinct. For given that they differ in their properties, then how can they be the same? However, many philosophers have suggested that this apparent difference in properties is the product of a linguistic illusion; there is just one thing out there, but different sorts or guises under which it may be described. I attempt to show that this ‘opacity’ defence has intolerable consequences for (...)
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  • When local models fail.Brian Epstein - 2008 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38 (1):3-24.
    Models treating the simple properties of social groups have a common shortcoming. Typically, they focus on the local properties of group members and the features of the world with which group members interact. I consider economic models of bureaucratic corruption, to show that (a) simple properties of groups are often constituted by the properties of the wider population, and (b) even sophisticated models are commonly inadequate to account for many simple social properties. Adequate models and social policies must treat certain (...)
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  • Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning.Lars Udehn - 2001 - Routledge.
    Throughout the history of social thought, there has been a constant battle over the true nature of society, and the best way to understand and explain it. This volume covers the development of methodological individualism, including the individualist theory of society from Greek antiquity to modern social science. It is a comprehensive and systematic treatment of methodological individualism in all its manifestations.
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  • Individualism in Social Science: Forms and Limits of a Methodology.Rajeev Bhargava - 1992 - Oxford University Press UK.
    The literature on methodological individualism is characterized by a widely held view that if the doctrine were stated with sufficient care it would be seen to be trivially true. Professor Bhargava questions this view. He begins by carefully disentangling the various formulations of the doctrine, identifies its most plausible version, and finally locates the principal assumption underlying it, namely that beliefs are attitudes individuated entirely in terms of what lies within the individual mind. Bhargava argues that once this individualist assumption (...)
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  • The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View.Raimo Tuomela - 2002 - Cambridge University Press.
    This is a systematic philosophical and conceptual study of the notion of a social practice. Raimo Tuomela explains social practices in terms of the interlocking mental states of the agents; he shows how social practices are 'building blocks of society'; and he offers a clear and powerful account of the way in which social institutions are constructed from these building blocks as established, interconnected sets of social practices with a special new social status. His analysis is based on the novel (...)
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  • Semantics and social science.Graham Macdonald - 1981 - Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Edited by Philip Pettit.
    Originally published in 1980, this book examines the major issues in the philosophy of social science, paying specific attention to cross-cultural understanding, humanism versus scientism, individualism versus collectivism, and the shaping of theory by evaluative commitment. Arguing for a cross-cultural conception of human beings, the authors defend humanism and individualism, and reject the notion that social inquiry is necessarily vitiated by an adherence to values.
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  • The common mind: an essay on psychology, society, and politics.Philip Pettit - 1993 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    What makes human beings intentional and thinking subjects? How does their intentionality and thought connect with their social nature and their communal experience? How do the answers to these questions shape the assumptions which it is legitimate to make in social explanation and political evaluation? These are the broad-ranging issues which Pettit addresses in this novel study. The Common Mind argues for an original way of marking off thinking subjects, in particular human beings, from other intentional systems, natural and artificial. (...)
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  • Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning.Lars Udehn - 2001 - Routledge.
    Throughout the history of social thought, there has been a constant battle over the true nature of society, and the best way to understand and explain it. This volume covers the development of methodological individualism, including the individualist theory of society from Greek antiquity to modern social science. It is a comprehensive and systematic treatment of methodological individualism in all its manifestations.
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  • Socializing Metaphysics : the Nature of Social Reality.Frederick F. Schmitt (ed.) - 2003 - Rowman & Littlefield, 65-91.
    Socializing Metaphysics supplies diverse answers to the basic questions of social metaphysics, from a broad array of voices.
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  • Intellectual norms and foundations of mind.Tyler Burge - 1986 - Journal of Philosophy 83 (December):697-720.
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