From: Hans Ehrbar <econ-AT-lists.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: pon3-20b
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 23:00:38 -0700


Consider for a moment a magnet F and the effect it has on
iron filings placed within its field.  Consider next the
thought T of that magnet and its effect.  That thought is
clearly the product of science, of culture, of history. 
Unlike the magnet it has no (discounting psycho-kinesis)
appreciable effect on iron.  Now every science must
construct its own object (T) in thought.  But it does not
follow from the fact that its thought of its real object (F)
must be constructed in and by (and exists only in) thought
that the object of its investigations is not independently
real.  (Indeed it was to mark the point, and the associated
ambiguity in the notion of an object of knowledge, that I
distinguished in Chapter 1 between transitive and
intransitive objects.)

Now whereas few people nowadays, at least outside the ranks
of professional philosophers, would hold that a magnetic
field is a construction of thought, the idea that society is
remains quite widely held.  Of course in the case of society
the grounds for this view are liable to consist in the idea
that it is constituted (in some way) by the thought of
social actors or participants, rather than, as in the case
of the magnetic field, the thought of observers or theorists
(or perhaps, moving to a more sophisticated plane, in some
relationship -- such as that of Schutzian `adequacy',^3
accomplished perhaps by some process of dialogue or
negotiation -- between the two).  And underlying that idea,
though by no means logically necessary for it,^4 is more
often than not the notion that society just consists (in
some sense) in persons and/or their actions.  Seldom does it
occur to subscribers to this view that an identical train of
thought logically entails their own reducibility, via the
laws and principles of neurophysiology, to the status of
inanimate things!

{PON3:27} In the next section I am going to consider the
claims of this naive position, which may be dubbed social
atomism, or rather of its epistemological manifestation in
the form of methodological individualism,^5 to provide a
framework for the explanation of social phenomena.  Of
course, as already mentioned in Chapter 1, if I am to
situate the possibility of a non-reductionist naturalism on
transcendental realist lines, then I must establish not only
the autonomy of a possible sociology, but the reality of any
objects so designated.  That is to say, I must show that
societies are complex real objects irreducible to simpler
ones, such as people.  For this purpose, merely to argue
against methodological individualism is insufficient.  But
it is necessary.  For if methodological individualism were
correct, we could dispense entirely with this chapter, and
begin (and end) our inquiry into the human sciences with a
consideration of the properties, be they rationally imputed
or empirically determined, of the individual atoms
themselves: that is, of the amazing (and more or less
tacitly gendered) homunculus man.




^3. See, for example, A. Schutz, `Common-Sense and Scientific
Interpretations of Human Actions', Collected Papers 1 (The
Hague 1967), or `Problems of Interpretative Sociology',
reprinted from The Phenomenology of the Social World (London
1967) in A. Ryan (ed.), The Philosophy of Social Explanation
(Oxford 1973).  (p. 26)

^4. As is evinced by the possibility of absolute idealism as
the ontological ground for idealist sociologies (often, and
arguably necessarily, combined with individualism -- for
example Weber or Dilthey -- or collectivism -- for example
Durkheim or, say, Levi-Strauss -- in the work of a single
author).  See also T. Benton, Philosophical Foundations of
the Three Sociologies (London 1977), p. 85, n. 11.  (p. 26)

^5. See the specific analogy drawn by J.W.N. Watkins between
methodological individualism in social science and mechanism
in physics in `Ideal Types and Historical Explanation',
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3 (1952),
reprinted in A. Ryan (ed.), op. cit., p. 90, and `Historical
Explanation in the Social Sciences', British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science 8 (1957), reprinted as `Methodological
Individualism and Social {PON3:72} Tendencies' in Readings
in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, M. Brodbeck (ed.)
(London 1970), p. 270.  (p. 27)


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