How Do Social Facts Relate to Facts about Individuals and Facts about Psychology?
Finally, we turn to the topic that many regard as the most fundamental in the philosophy of social science: the question of the relationship between social facts and individual facts.
This is the question to which methodological individualism is a famous reply. The question raises issues about ontology - what is the nature of social entities? Are they composed solely of features of individuals? But it also raises questions about inter-theoretical reduction: should we expect that all statements or explanations at the level of the social should be reducible, in principle, to statements at the level of individuals? Or are there social explanations that are autonomous with respect to facts about specific individuals?What is the relationship between facts about society and facts about individuals? Are there any social facts that are autonomous with respect to facts about individuals, as Durkheim maintained? Or are social facts reducible to some set of facts about individuals? Methodological individualism is the view that holds that social explanations need to be based on facts about individuals and their motivations. The position holds that there are no causal properties at the level of complex social entities; rather, all social causes operate through features of individual behavior. The position of methodological individualism extends back to Mill (1879), Weber (1949), and J.W.N. Watkins (1968). It is primarily opposed to the idea that there are “holistic” social facts (Durkheim) - social facts that are autonomous with respect to facts about individuals.
The contrary position is holism or structuralism. Durkheim was an explicit social holist; he maintained that social facts are autonomous with respect to facts about individuals, and that we need to focus the scientific attention of sociology upon large social facts such as morality, law, or the division of labor.
Individual consciousness and behavior are influenced by these large social facts, but individuals do not constitute or determine those facts. (Steven Lukes' biography of Durkheim provides a very astute analysis of his conception of social holism; see Lukes 1972.) Structuralism derives from different intellectual roots; but the view gives similar autonomy to the level of social structures as exercising primacy over individual actions. Structures determine individuals rather than individuals determining structures. Structuralist theorists include Godelier (1972), Althusser and Balibar (1971), and Hindess and Hirst (1975), who attribute explanatory primacy to structures such as the capitalist mode of production, and anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, who give primacy to structures of cultural realities, such as the kinship system within a culture, over the thoughts and behavior of individuals (Levi-Strauss 1969).The thesis of methodological individualism can be formulated as a statement about explanation, as a thesis about social ontology, or as a statement about inter-theoretic reduction. The explanatory version holds that “social phenomena are best explained in terms of the motivations and interactions of individual persons” (Steel 2006, 440). The ontological version maintains that social entities and their properties are constituted by individuals and their actions: “This perspective affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes, but it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals” (Little 2006, 346). The intertheoretic version holds that it is “possible to reduce theories containing social predicates to theories stated in terms of individuals and their properties only” (Zahle 2003, 77).
Methodological individualism has had a rebirth of interest in recent years (Udehn 2001, Zahle 2007). James Woodward (2000) and Daniel Steel (2006) have explicated the position in terms of a theory of what the claim about explanation amounts to.
Woodward's fundamental idea is that one explanation is more fundamental than another if it is “invariant” with respect to a wider range of interventions.Micro-economics and rational choice theory are the areas of the social sciences that are most explicitly founded in the assumptions of methodological individualism. The goal of these fields is to explain social outcomes as the aggregate result of decisions by rationally self-interested agents.
A recent strategy in approaching the issue of the relationship between social facts and individual facts is to postulate that social-level statements and causal judgments need to be provided with micro-foundations: descriptions of the pathways through which socially situated individuals are led to act in such a way as to bring about the macro-level fact. (See Little 1989, 1998 and Elster 1989 on this position.)
Reducibility means that the statements of one scientific discipline should be logically deducible from the truths of some other “more fundamental” discipline. It is sometimes maintained that the truths of chemistry ought in principle to be derivable from those of quantum mechanics. A field of knowledge that is not reducible to another field R is said to be “autonomous with respect to R.” Philosophers sometimes further distinguish “law-to-law” reduction, “type-to-type” reduction, “law- to-singular-fact” reduction, and “type-to-token” reduction.
Are social sciences such as economics, sociology, or political science reducible in principle to some other more fundamental field - perhaps psychology, neurophysiology, or the theory of rationality? To begin to answer this question we must first decide what items might be reduced: statements, truths, laws, facts, categories, or generalizations. Second, we need to distinguish several reasons for failure of reduction: failure in principle, because events, types, and laws at the social level are simply not fixed by states of affairs at “lower” levels; and failure for reasons of limits on computation.
(The motions of a five-body system of stars might be determined by the laws of gravitation even though it is practically impossible to perform the calculations necessary to determine future states of the system.)So now we can consider the question of social reduction in a reasonably clear form. Consider first the “facts” that pertain to a domain of phenomena - whether these facts are known or not. (I choose not to concentrate on laws or generalizations, because I am doubtful about the availability of strong laws of social phenomena.) Do the facts of a hypothetically complete theory of human psychology “fix in principle” the facts of economics or sociology, given appropriate information about boundary conditions?
One important approach to this problem is the theory of supervenience (Kim 2005, 1993). A level of description is said to supervene upon another level just in case there can be no differences of state at the first level without there being a difference of state at the second level. The theory is first applied to mental states and states of neurophysiology: “no differences in mental states without some difference in neurophysiology states.” Supervenience theory implies an answer to the question of whether one set of facts “fixes in principle” the second set of facts. (It has been taken as obviously true that social facts supervene upon facts about individuals; how could it be otherwise? What other constitutive or causal factors might influence social facts, beyond the actions and ideas of individuals?) If the facts about social life supervene upon facts about the psychological states of individuals, then it follows that the totality of facts about individual psychology fixes in principle the totality of facts about social life. (Otherwise there would be the situation that there are two total social worlds corresponding to one total “individual psychology ” world; so there would be a difference at the social level without a difference at the level of individual psychology.)
So this provides the beginnings of an answer to our question: if we believe that social facts supervene upon facts about individuals, then we are forced to accept that the totality of facts about individuals “fix” the facts about society.
However, supervenience does not imply “reducibility in principle,” let alone “reducibility in practice” between levels. In order to have redu- cibility, it is necessary to have a system of statements describing features of the lower level which are sufficient to permit deductive derivation (or perhaps probabilistic inference) of all of the true statements contained in the higher-level domain. If it is a social fact that “collective action tends to fail when groups are large,” then there would need to be a set of statements at the level of individual psychology that logically entail this statement.Two additional logical features would appear to be required for reduction: a satisfactory set of bridge statements (linking the social term to some construction of individual-level terms; “collective action” to some set of features of individual agents, so there is a mapping of concepts and ontologies between the two domains), and at least some statements at the lower level that have the form of general laws or law-like probabilistic statements. (If there are no general statements at the lower level, then deductive inference will be limited to truth-functional deduction.)
Now it is time for a speculative leap: a judgment call on the question of whether we ought to look for reductive links between social facts and individual-level facts. My intuition is that it is not scientifically useful to do so, for several reasons. First is the point about computational limits: even if the outcome of a riot is “fixed” by the full psychological states of participants ex ante and their strategic interactions during the event, it is obviously impossible to gather that knowledge and aggregate it into a full and detailed model of the event. So deriving a description of the outcome from a huge set of facts about the participants is unpromising. Second, it is telling that we need to refer to the strategic interactions of participants in order to model the social event; this means that the social event has a dynamic internal structure that is sensitive to sub-events that occur along the way.
(Jones negotiates with Smith more effectively than Brown negotiates with Black. The successful and failed negotiations make a difference in the outcome but are unpredictable and contingent.) Third, the facts at the social level rarely aggregate to simple laws or regularities that might have been derived from lower-level laws and regularities; instead, social outcomes are contingent and varied.So, for a variety of reasons, it is reasonable to take the view that social facts supervene upon facts about individuals, but that social explanations are autonomous from laws of psychology. At the same time, the view that social explanations require micro-foundations appears to be a reasonable one: we need to know what it is about the circumstances and motives of individuals such that their ordinary socially situated choices and behavior result in the social processes and causal connections that we observe. And in field after field it is possible to demonstrate that it is possible to provide such micro-foundations.
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