ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the structurally similar arguments of antireductionist social scientists and psychologists. Part of the argument for holism derives from the motive of showing sociology to be an "autonomous science"— one distinct from and independent of psychology. Any argument for the existence of social facts must rest entirely on the adequacy of an explanatory theory of human actions that requires such facts. The causal chain must pass through individuals, and this threatens the autonomy of disciplines that deal with social facts. As an epistemological or methodological thesis, antireductionism and the autonomy of biology from physics, or the macrosocial sciences from psychology, or for that matter psychology from neuroscience, is probably not controversial. It will be convenient to have a few technical terms for the relationship between chairs and their physical constituents: supervenience and multiple realizability.
