ABSTRACT
Methodological individualism covers various views to the effect that facts about societies are explainable in terms of facts about individuals, while methodological holism denies this. T.Burge, ‘Individualism and the mental’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. IV,
Minnesota UP, 1979. (Cf. also his ‘Individualism and psychology’, Philosophical Review, 1986. Burge introduces individualism in this sense, arguing against it. M.Davies, ‘Individualism and perceptual content’ and G.Segal, ‘Defence of a reasonable individualism’, both in Mind, 1971, respectively defend and attack Burge’s position.)
F.Egan, ‘Must psychology be individualistic?’, Philosophical Review, 1991. (Attacks both Burge and Fodor, and claims the answer depends on the goal of the theorizing.)
F.Egan, ‘Individualism, computation, and perceptual content’, Mind, 1992. J.A.Fodor, Psychosemantics, MIT Press, 1987, chapter 2. (Defends individualism in
psychology. See also his ‘A modal argument for narrow content’, Journal of Philosophy, 1991, for a distinction between individualism and internalism.)
D.-H.Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World, RKP, 1985. (See especially pp. 150ff. for methodological individualism. See also K.R.Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, RKP, 1945, chapter 14.)
. There seem to be four main senses: (i) whatever can be counted, one by one (‘individuated’), or can be talked of or referred to (logical subjects: see MEANING). In this sense all particulars (see UNIVERSALS) are individuals, but not vice-versa. Beauty is an individual. We can talk about it and distinguish it from other things, but it is a universal and not a particular (it seems not to exist ‘all at once’ like an object in space and time). Tennis is an individual, though not a particular, nor perhaps a universal (‘tennis’ does not seem to behave like words in ‘-ity’, ‘-ness’, ‘-hood’, etc.). ‘Individual’ in this first main sense resembles ‘OBJECT’ when the ‘existence’ strand of that word is dominant.
