Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;It is frequently asserted that the debate between individualists and non-individualists is futile and that a suitably modified methodological individualism is trivially true. This thesis seeks to challenge this assertion, and to revive the debate by first identifying a plausible version of methodological individualism and then by outlining a non-individualist alternative. ;Identifying a plausible version of methodological individualism is not easy because the doctrine is rarely stated with clarity and precision. Chapter I seeks to remedy this deficiency and unravels the various forms of methodological individualism. It also affirms that the doctrine would not be individualist if it did not possess a residual psychologism; for the individualist, intentional contents must, in principle, be individually individuated. ;I examine in detail all significant versions of explanatory individualism. Chapter II takes up its reductionist variants and concludes that most non-individualist arguments against the irreducibility of the social to the individual founder because of a failure to distinguish correlatory and micro-reductionist versions of methodological individualism. While good arguments exist against the possibility of correlatory laws connecting social and individual properties, their success presupposes the absence of identity reductions. No arguments are found in this chapter against these. However, the following chapter impugns two of the central assumptions of all nomological variants. This considerably weakens the case for such explicable non-nomologically in terms of the beliefs and desires of individuals. ;In Chapter V, an assumption of intentionalism that beliefs have a linguistic content is examined. It is claimed that such contents have an ineliminable social character. It is contended that beliefs qua attitudes have a social dimension and that they presuppose the existence of social practices. A conception of such practices is outlined to forestall the objection that they can be reduced to inter-psychologically generated actions. With this view of social beliefs and practices, we hope to possess a sketch of contextualism, the non-individualist methodological stance that encourages an independent study of social practices and a contextual study of individual intentional states. If this attempt is even partly successful, we have at least two rival prescriptive ideals guiding the social scientist. This considerably bolsters up the contention of the thesis that something serious continues to be at stake in the debate between the individualist and the non-individualist