Abstract

The term “holism” refers to a variety of positions which have in common a resistance to understanding larger unities as merely the sum of their parts, and an insistence that we cannot explain or understand the parts without treating them as belonging to such larger wholes. Some of these issues concern explanation (see explanation). It is argued, for example, that facts about social classes are not reducible to facts about the beliefs and actions of the agents who belong to them; or it is claimed that we only understand the actions of individuals by locating them in social roles or systems of social meanings.