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My aim in this paper is to formulate and defend a metaphysical principle which may help us to overcome a misleading dichotomy between individualistic and holistic ways of thinking about the social sciences. The idea is that there is a non-causal, non-reductive relation of dependence between facts about social institutions and facts about the behaviour of individuals; that the social is supervenient upon the individual. Adopting this idea enables us to reconcile certain holistic aspects of the social-aspects which I shall discuss below-with an insight that has motivated much that has been written in defence of methodological individualism (MI). This insight has been expressed in various ways: that social institutions 'do not possess a quasi-divine autonomy'; that 'every complex social situation or event is a result of a particular configuration of individuals, their dispositions, situations, beliefs and physical resources and environments'; that 'it is people who determine history, however people themselves are determined'.' The supervenience thesis captures these ideas in a quite precise way. It says that, whatever complex and reciprocal relations there are between social entities and individuals, it is the totality of individual facts which determines the totality of social facts. Accordingly, I shall begin with a distinction between individual and social facts. I shall then offer a rigorous formulation of the supervenience thesis. It will be shown how the thesis

not merely to promote the interests of the whole half-hive, but to adapt drastically their biological structure in order to do so. It seems extremely difficult to believe that the emergence of these two new systems of specialised functions could be explained individualistically, in terms of the situations and principles of behaviour of each bee, because all the bees in either half of the hive were of approximately the same type and in approximately the same situation, yet only the requisite number adapted themselves to new functions. Thus the bee-hive appears to be an organism in the sense that its pattern of behaviour is determined by teleological principles which apply to the hive as a whole and which cannot be derived from a knowledge of individual bees. The principle whose status I have been trying to elucidate is a methodological rule which presupposes the factual assertion that human societies are not organisms in the above sense. There is no evidence to suggest that this presupposition is false. But it is at any rate conceivable that such evidence will be found. If this happened I should not wholly abandon the principle of methodological individualism; for if holistic sociological laws were discovered I should hope that they were not sui generis, but were themselves explicable in individualistic terms (just as I hope that the re-emergence of specialisation in the bifurcated bee-hive will eventually be explained individualistically). However, the rule of methodological individualism would have to be partially suspended in the improbable event of a sociological discovery which undermined the rule's factual basis. J. W. N. WATKINS MECHANICAL CHESS-PLAYER