Scaling Up, Scaling Down: What’s Missing?

“Individualist” is a charge levied against many scientific and philosophic approaches. The term can mean many things, and it has multiple contrast terms. Just for starters, philosophers and social science researchers distinguish between metaphysical individualism and methodological individualism. Methodological individualism is a form of research parsimony, a recommendation to look for explanatory relations at a single level of analysis, the level of individuals. Economic analysis that analyzes changes in the distribution of wealth as the outcome of multiple choices made by individual participants in the economy is guided by methodological individualism. Metaphysical individualism is a “nothing but” view: nothing but individuals (or the atomic constituents of individuals) are real entities. One can be a methodological individualist without being committed to the metaphysical view, but my contention is that even methodological individualism (indiscriminately followed) can be empirically misleading. This talk focuses on the ways behavior is conceptualized in behavioral sciences. Many philosophers who criticize individualism in philosophy and in the sciences arguefor the introduction of group level analysis. I will be suggesting that there is a level intermediate between the individual and the group, at which certain questions are better entertained. To make the case, I will review work from my recent Studying Human Behavior on the operationalization of behavioral concepts, show how an individualist ontology is presupposed in such operationalization, and introduce questions that cannot be answered if this presupposition is maintained. Interaction, I will suggest, is a necessary alternative ontological category to those of individual or group.