At the risk of tooting my own horn, I wrote a piece on MI called "Metaphysical
Individualism and Functional Explanation," Philosophy of Science 1993, that I still
think is quite good. In the context of the Cohen-Elster debate, I argued that:
1. Functional explanation is legitimate, but Cohen's account of it in terms of
"consequence laws" is wrong; you need a mechanical account of explanation, i.e., one
that regards explanation as exposing the causal mechanisms.
2. MI has two senses that are not often distinguished: the claim that the individual
level of explanation is the only legitimate one, andthe claim that the individual
level is a legitimate one, but not the only one. Most of the problems around MI derive
from the first version, but this is utterly implausible. Whether the second version is
true is an open question, but even if it is, that does not threaten functional
explanation or other kinds of explanation that refer to group phenomena in an
explanatory way. After all, on the second version, individualistic explanation is
merely available, not required.
There, now you don't have to read the piece. But you should.
--jks
In a message dated Wed, 21 Jun 2000 10:11:36 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Jim Devine
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<< At 04:02 AM 06/21/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>At the risk of sounding somewhat Hegelian. The problem can be looked at like
>this. Both the individual and the group exist with equal ontological status.
>Methodological individual gives priority to the individual, while some
>forms of
>sociology (including some varieties of of Marxism) give priority to the group.
In their THE DIALECTICAL BIOLOGIST, a book that everyone on pen-l should
read, Lewins and Lewontin describe the dialectical method as follow (to
paraphrase): "part makes whole, while whole makes part." That is,
individual people make the structure of social relations (though not as
they please) at the same time as the structure of social relations makes us
who we are (how we think, what we want, etc.) though there are some
biological limits to this latter determination (just as there are limits on
what kinds of societies can be created). This mutual determination is a
dynamic process rather than reaching an equilibrium, BTW.
this dialectical view would reject _both_ methodological individualism
(because it ignores the feed-back from society to the individual) and
radical holism (because it ignores individual agency).
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine/AS
>>
