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Two theories of action—methodological individualism and composite agency theory—are compared, together with their associated concepts of moral responsibility. They agree that deeds are done by doers, and that moral responsibility for a deed lies with its doer, but they differ on the definition of the doer. Methodological individualism holds that doers are limited to human individuals. Composite agency theory, noting that most deeds can be done only by humans working in concert with nonhumans (this is especially clear when computers are involved), defines a doer as whatever combination of human and nonhuman entities is necessary to accomplish a deed. Methodological individualism limits moral responsibility to human individuals while composite agency theory attributes it to the combination of humans and nonhumans that did the deed. Objections to this view of moral responsibility, and responses to them, are discussed. In the West, methodological individualism is shown to be rooted in humanistic modernity, while composite agency theory emerges from postmodernity. Nonwestern examples similar to both composite agency theory and methodological individualism are reviewed.

Anthropologists contend that the organism-environment connections responsible for human evolution are indirect—mediated by culture. This chapter reviews influential twentieth-century anthropological interpretations of the cultural mediation of human adaptations to environments, arguing that ethnography and other qualitative forms of analysis reveal important phenomena overlooked by quantitative analysts committed to methodological individualism. It highlights work by post-positivist anthropologists, who describe relations among human and non-human organisms, cultural forms, and features of environments as “natural-cultural” networks, an approach reminiscent of developmental systems theory and niche construction. Evolutionary theorists have much to gain by incorporating these sophisticated, contemporary post-positivist anthropological understandings of culture into their models of human-environment connections.

With “Control, Alt, Delete, username, password” we daily gain access to the digital world. Failure to comply? Access denied! From a perspective nourished by the fields of Law and Literature, and Law and the Humanities, this chapter focuses on the influence of new technologies on our idea of the human and the idea of (the rule of) law. It aims to formulate some questions pertaining to a humanistic view of technology by means of an analysis of the German author-lawyer-philosopher Juli Zeh’s novel Corpus Delicti. This novel’s main theme is a state’s obsessive and omnipresent health concerns that prove to be an inescapable ideology with devastating consequences for its citizens. The juridical-political ideal of around-the-clock observation, lack of privacy, control and prevention that transpires in this novel works to the detriment of the main character Mia Holl who observes that law is a game that we all have to play. While disciplinary society’s sites of confinement may have broken down, new technologies introduce new forms of disciplining the human and this development speaks for our attention to the risks of an uninformed application of technology in and for law.

This chapter responds to recent calls for the interdisciplinary study of women and education. Specifically, it examines the liberatory power of informal education through religion and religion’s reproduction of gendered relations. It utilizes an interdisciplinary approach based on former sociological research to examine the complexity of interactions among both social structural environments and woman’s ability to move within, between and among these environments for women in Turkey.

In recent times, teamwork has emerged as a popular way of organizing work. Not only is teamwork presented as being more effective than the alternatives, but it is also commonly argued that it can improve the quality of our working lives because it acknowledges the human tendency toward cooperative behavior in groups. This chapter subjects teamwork, as particular configuration of the employment relationship, to ethical scrutiny. An ethical consideration of the employment relationship, taking its lead economics, usually focuses on the identification and enforcement of contractually binding obligations. Reflecting the methodological individualism of much of today’s economics, analytically, this commonly involves understanding the moral dimension of the dyadic relationship between employer and employee or “principal” and “agent.” With the rise of teamwork, however, this dyadic relationship becomes analytically less tractable. This is because, under conditions of teamwork, the contract is usually struck with the team as a whole, and as such, it is difficult to disaggregate the collective obligations of the team into a set of individual obligations. In light of this difficulty, this chapter considers some alternative ways of understanding the moral dimension of teamwork. These include, inter alia, Kantian and Aristotelian ethics, but the chapter concludes with a critical consideration of developments in genetic biology and the cognitive sciences that appear to support our understanding of teamwork as an extension of our human nature.

There is a long tradition for separating explanation from interpretation that has permeated the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the human sciences. The tradition was fuelled partly by the positivistic distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, partly by Hempel’s model of explanation, but mostly by the hermeneutic philosophy in the social and human sciences. These traditions may now have come to an end. In this paper I shall present a unitary theory of explanation and interpretation, a theory which I have argued for elsewhere, in which interpretations, or rather a group of interpretations, are considered as explanations of meaning.

Rational choice theory (RCT) is a research paradigm based on methodological individualism. Collective phenomena are explained by assumptions about the behavior of (subjectively) rational individual or corporate actors. In environmental research, RCT is used to predict ecological perceptions, attitudes and behavior on the micro level, and to shed light on environmental outcomes on the macro level. The most fundamental insight from RCT is that environmental problems are often the result of a social dilemma, that is, individuals’ purposive action leads to unintended negative collective consequences. This chapter addresses variants of RCT including game theory, shows applications in the field of environmental sociology on the micro and macro level, and points to new trends in RCT such as neuroeconomics and happiness research which may also be useful for environmental sociology.

In this chapter, I argue that Karl Popper was a communitarian philosopher. This will surprise some readers. Liberals often tout Popper as one of their champions. Indeed, there is no doubt that Popper shared much in common with liberals. However, I will argue that Popper rejected a central, though perhaps not essential, pillar of liberal theory, namely, individualism. This claim may seem to contradict Popper's professed methodological individualism. Yet I argue that Popper was a methodological individualist in name only. In fact, methodological individualism faded from Popper's vocabulary as he moved institutions and situational analysis more firmly to centre-stage. Popper's focus on institutions and situations constitutes what I call his communitarianism. If my interpretation is correct, then theorists in the sociology of scientific knowledge and communitarian epistemology should reconsider their long-standing distrust of Popper's philosophy. Indeed, they may have much to gain by treating Popper as a friend rather than a foe.

Unlike Esthappen and Rahel, I usually think of myself as Me, and I think as We or Us when thinking of myself together with other selves. I believe I am not a special case: most people (except, perhaps, real or fictional twins like Esthappen and Rahel) think of themselves in a similar way. When talking about Us, though, ‘We’ can be used in different occasions with different meanings. Leaving aside majestic uses and the like, sometimes ‘We’ merely refers to a set, a collection of people where ‘I’ is included. In this case, ‘we’ is nothing over and above the aggregation of individuals, an abbreviated manner of referring to her, you and me. But, sometimes we mean something stronger by ‘We’. In this stronger sense, We is not yet a synonym for her, you and me; we somehow have been able to constitute together a new ‘entity’ called ‘We’.

With the rapid development of modern industrial society, many ethical problems arise. A central one is the tendency of increasing social disintegration and loss of communal bonds. Common ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity which have had force since the Enlightenment are losing their social power. The centripetal force which once united us to make efforts for the same goals is losing the ability to bend us to the basic principles which served as moral foundations of our ethics.

Unlike most economists, the late F. A. Hayek ventured often into domains other than the strictly economic. As a result, his work encompasses a number of social disciplines. Such intellectual trespassing might well have led to a diffuse and disconnected body of work; but this is a danger Hayek understood and largely avoided. The unifying thread in his work is arguably his vision of society as an evolved system of rules, which he often discussed in terms of the concept of “spontaneous order.”

In the preceding two chapters I have argued for a position called ‘legal reductionism’. Law can be reduced to facts and can, at least partly, be explained in terms of positive morality. I shall argue that this form of legal positivism fits within the institutional theory of law. Since MacCormick and Weinberger themselves suggest that their institutional theory of law is not reductionist, it should be made clear what the reductionism of legal reductionism exactly amounts to, and that is what I set out to do in this and the next chapter. In this chapter I shall address the more general question of the possibility of a reductionist approach to the analysis of institutions. Game theory can be seen as a paradigmatic example of a reductionist approach. Since I shall develop a game-theoretic analysis of rights and legal systems, I shall argue that the reductionism of game theory is suitable for an institutional analysis. To do so, I first discuss the meaning of the terms ‘methodological individualism’ and ‘reductionism’. After having made clear what I understand by these terms, I describe some of the essentials of game theory.

While there are merits in a ‘market’ approach to analyse VET, such a paradigm shift should not be implemented in a way that ignores some important lessons of a ‘systems’ approach. Both approaches are basically one-sided in their interpretation of human (inter)action. The ‘systems’ approach tends to overrate stability in that it stresses the fact that human beings in various societies show a remarkable preference for doing many things in a basically similar way to their ancestors. The social discipline of cultural anthropology provides a vast body of literature that documents this fact, and contains many striking examples. The ‘market’ approach tends to overrate change in that it basically conceives of human beings as basing all of their action on an inherently rational choice that best serves their personal interests. The discipline of economics provides a vast body of literature that has been quite successful in explaining important facts this way. Both perspectives are thus important. Each on their own, however, entails a considerable risk of near-sightedness in the explanation of human behaviour and its aggregate effects.

The concept of ‘social science’ is the most salient feature of the Enlightenment Project. If there could be social science then we could derive from it the social technology that is the ultimate practical objective of the Enlightenment Project. In this chapter we show how the Enlightenment Project survives and functions within analytic social science. Specifically, we argue (1) that the unity of science thesis exemplifies the Project; (2) that during its eliminative phase analytic social science adheres not only to a covering law model of explanation but to a methodological individualism that makes social science derivative from psychology; (3) that during its subsequent exploratory stage, methodological individualism gives way to a social theory of meaning; and (4) that exploration achieves its Hegelian moment within the Enlightenment Project by leading to Marxism. Finally, we indicate what social thought as explication would be as an alternative to the Enlightenment Project in social science. The analytic understanding of human beings as outlined in the previous chapter and this one, and its reflection of the Enlightenment Project of a social technology, will be crucial for the analytic understanding of ethical and political philosophy in the subsequent chapters.

There is indeed something very wrong about the idea that trust could be motivated by prudential considerations. In the previous chapter, it was argued that the attempt fails on its own terms. At this point we will need to have a new look at some assumptions about trust inherent in the argument that was rejected.

Many recent debates on the tasks and purposes of hermeneutic philosophy of science suggest a distinction between micro- and macro-hermeneutics of science. What I refer to here is a distinction between a hermeneutic theory of effective-historical consciousness on the level of scientific community and a hermeneutic-ontological analysis of the nature of modern science. Certainly, the distinction I have in mind has nothing to do with the distinction between micro- and macro-foundations in contemporary philosophy of social sciences. Micro-hermeneutics is not to be considered as a sort of methodological individualism. Micro-hermeneutics does not strive for interpretative explanations of individual behavior. Its aim is not to interpret scientific enterprise by referring only to the “intentional properties” of individuals who are involved in this enterprise. Micro-hermeneutics is rather a kind of social holism because it starts out from the ontological primordiality of the scientific-community’s modes of constructing a world of research objects.

In part, what sustains transaction cost and, more generally, contractarian approaches to the understanding of the firm is a particular view of social science. It is the reductionist view that phenomena have to be understood by breaking them down conceptually into smaller and smaller constitutive components: it is said that wholes should be explained in terms of their parts. In the social sciences, these injunctions typically take the form of an atomistic ontology and a challengeable methodological individualism (Hodgson, 1988). Yet it has been repeatedly asserted by philosophers, including Popper (e.g., Popper and Eccles, 1977, p. 18), that complete reductionism has never been achieved in any science. At least in economics, it is arguable that complete reductionism is not possible (Hodgson, 1993b; Udehn, 1987).

Rational choice theory has become very fashionable in all social sciences, from anthropology to history. Actually it is not a theory but a family of models that share two simple and attractive ideas. One of them is the version of the Rationality Postulate according to which people know what is best for them, and act accordingly. The other basic idea is that this feature of human cognition, valuation, choice, volition and action is all we need to know in order to account for social life anywhere and at any time. This is of course the Methodological Individualism Postulate. These two ideas, if true, would be extraordinarily powerful. Indeed, they would allow us to explain, predict and plan all human actions in any society. Furthermore, they would unify all of the social sciences and sociotechnologies. No wonder then that rational choice models have been mushrooming over the past half century in all of the so-called human sciences.

Feminist social scientists have been, and still are, facing special epistemological and methodological problems. Critical Rationalism offers some basic insights that could be very helpful to them in these concerns.

In his Autobiography, R.G. Collingwood writes that at a certain point in an academic’s life, his colleagues gather together to write a Festschrift in his honor, and thereby to indicate that, in their judgement, he is over the hill.2 In the case of Joseph Agassi, this is far from the case. Indeed, the present contribution should be understood as a plea to Agassi as a philosopher of immense erudition and productive capacity to mend his ways, and to give us the important work of which I think him capable while he is in his intellectual prime.

First, my congratulations to this journal. Its establishment was not easy. Especially in the beginning it functioned as a source of ideas that were hard to get published elsewhere. Important in this respect was the advocated change in paradigm concerning the analysis of government behavior, notwithstanding the fact that this change largely consisted in the application of an existing paradigm — the neo-classical view — to politics. The journal also played an important role in getting economists and political scientists listening to each other, thereby giving an impulse to the integration (‘unification’) of at least two product divisions in the social sciences. This integration has not proved to be a one-sided, ‘imperialistic’, affair (cf. Ordeshook, 1989). The outstanding contribution of economists has been to show to other social scientists the strength of their rational choice approach, with its ingredients of methodological individualism, goal-oriented and self-interested behavior. By adopting this approach political scientists, and others, have in their turn been able to show its limitations and to modify and enrich it with their own theoretical insights. Recent developments in game theory have added impulses for a further elaboration of the approach, focusing on its strategic implications. Also, psychologists and sociologists (‘analytical sociologists’) seem increasingly interested, were it only to show the limitations. This confrontation from diverse fields in the social sciences is very wholesome, and will certainly impact on the future development of public choice.

I do not disagree with E. K. Hunt’s admirable description of analytical Marxism, nor do I differ strongly with his characterization of its differences with traditional Marxism. These differences are deep and fundamental, to the point that rational choice Marxism can indeed be considered hostile to many of traditional Marxism ‘ s most basic tenets. In this essay I will neither attempt to defend analytical Marxism against Hunt’s critique nor will I endorse this critique. I am not analytical Marxist, although I have sympathy with some of its positions. Nor am I a traditional Marxist, having made my peace with Marxism in my joint work with Samuel Bowles, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (1986). Marxism, I believe, has given us many important insights into the operation of society, but has no monopoly on truth.

As noted in the Preface, the conception of the present book has from the very beginning been deeply rooted in a point of view that regards contemporary social economics as a highly pluralistic field of inquiry. It would seem, accordingly, that any meaningful attempt to better comprehend it will have to come to grips with its characteristic inner diversity. Today, pluralism is the very key, the nuts and bolts of modern social economics, and even more certainly, the glue that has been holding it together. At the same time, especially in the present context, we need to recognize that there can be some diversity in the concept and meaning of “pluralism” itself. In particular, we will here distinguish between a “strong version” and a more “moderate version” of pluralism. One is epistemological and ontological, the other merely epistemological.

When James Buchanan was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics the Nobel committee cited The Calculus of Consent,1 co-authored in 1962 with Gordon Tullock, as Buchanan’s most important work. But Buchanan himself has stated that he considers his 1969 book, Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory,2 to be his most important theoretical contribution.

The main concern of this book is to develop and present a theory of multi-agent action. Given that we succeed in that and in creating a system of social action concepts, we may ask how other social concepts, such as the concepts of group, institution, and organization, relate to our system of social action concepts. To this question our answer is that from the conceptual point of view, or “in the conceptual order”, all social concepts can in a sense be built out of social action concepts. This, if acceptable, bestows much extra importance to the enterprise of this book. As our general programme for the construction of social concepts (especially holistic ones) does not depend on the details of our theory of social action to be developed and as it is useful to have these broader perspectives in mind before going into the technical details of this theory of social action, we shall below sketch our view of how to build social concepts individualistically out of social action concepts (including we-intentions and mutual beliefs). The second aim of the present chapter is to elucidate individualistically the notion of we-intention. This concept is going to play a central role in our theory of social action quite irrespective of how our general programme of concept formation in the social sciences fares.

This paper is not in a field to which Imre Lakatos made any published contribution (at least since he came to England). But he was intensely interested in matters political, and he often urged that we should revive our department’s traditional concern with political philosophy. This is an essay in that direction. (I realise, of course, that my two criticisms of Hobbes are small beer in comparison with Popper’s criticism of Plato and Marx. But not everyone in the commonwealth of learning must hope to be a master-demolisher. It is ambition enough to be employed as an underminer of one or two erroneous ideas.) My other justification for contributing this piece to the present volume is that my old friend seemed to enjoy an earlier version of it which I gave as an inaugural lecture. At least, he told me that it had surprised him.

1. Third World Epistemology.- 2. Psychoanalysis, Pseudo-Science and Testability.- 3. Popper and the Mind-Body Problem.- 4. Social Facts and Psychological Facts.- 5. Methodological Individualism: An Incongruity in Popper's Philosophy.- 6. Popper and Liberalism.- 7. Making Sense of Critical Dualism.- 8. Beyond Cultural Relativism.- 9. Good and Bad Arguments against Historicism.- 10. Popper's Critique of Marx's Method.- 11. Popper and German Social Philosophy.- 12. Socrates and Democracy.- Notes on Contributors.- Index of Names.

I would like to explore some of the brief comments made by Prof. Harsanyi about applying normative notions of rationality for positive purposes in the social sciences. I share some of the usual puzzlement about such use. How is it that rationality theory, as derived from classical economics to mean something like efficient goal-directed behaviour, serves the dual function of prescribing conditionally what behaviour ought to be and also of describing, predicting, and explaining actual behaviour? After all, rationality has traditionally been associated with other normative disciplines, mainly logic, epis-temology, and ethics. And no one seriously takes these domains to serve this dual function. Normative they are, but positive they are not.

My aim in the present essay is to argue that individualism need not be psychologistic, and to defend institutionalistic individualism, which I consider to be Popper’s great contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences.

Knowledge and Politics, by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, came out in the same year, 1975, as The Limits of Liberty by James M. Buchanan. While Buchanan attempts to ground our understanding of liberty and the role of government upon methodological individualism, Unger attacks the whole individualist body of thought that has grown up in the modern West from Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century onward. Unger elucidates this tradition of thought and, in drawing out its background assumptions more thoroughly than was done in the last chapter, argues that individualism is in a state of crisis, similar to the one in ancient and medieval thought which led to individualism in the first place. Unger argues that individualism, taken as a whole, fails both to be internally consistent and to correspond with life as it is in fact lived. He offers an alternative to both ancient and medieval thought and modern individualism which may be regarded as collectivist, and thus a suitable adversary to Buchanan’s individualism, but which is, as we shall argue, more muddled than collectivist. In the next chapter, we shall expound the ontology of Mario Bunge and later apply his systemic world view to discuss social justice, natural rights and federalism, taking the best features from atomistic individualism and holistic collectivism, the better to have a common framework to discuss all viewpoints.

Sartre once claimed that existentialism was “nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position.”1/ One could characterize Foucault’s approach to history as an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently nominalistic position. For the “archaeologies,” “genealogies” and most recently “problematizations” of human discursive and nondiscursive practices that have issued from his pen over the quarter century preceding his untimely death are united by their aggressively anti-Platonic and individualist stance. Foucault has noted this proclivity on several occasions.2/ Given the privileged place of history in his writings (all of his major works are “histories” of a kind), if the nominalist position is so central to his thought, it should afford us a valuable perspective on his work overall.

Metaphysics constitutes sets of statements or principles; methodology constitutes sets of rules. Metaphysics is constitutive; methodology is regulative. That, metaphysics gives birth to rules of research — scientific or pseudoscientific — was obvious for long; Wittgenstein and Popper, following a lead of Bertrand Russell, went further and tried to do away with the constitutive while retaining the regulative which might be necessary for scientific research. In Wittgenstein’s case things obviously don’t work. I shall venture to argue that Popper’s case is also objectionable. (In the case of Wittgenstein, as well as in that of Popper, incidentally, I refer exclusively to the author’s first and classic book.)

Basic scientific research has two general goals: to increase our knowledge of the world and to increase our understanding of the world. We increase our knowledge mainly by discovering new facts about particular circumstances and new general laws. We increase our understanding mainly by constructing explanations of previously discovered knowledge, and by organizing the knowledge and explanations into systematic and general theories. Suppose that we have two different theories, T 1 and T 2. It is sometimes possible to explain the laws of T 2 by using as explanans laws of T 1 together with appropriate connecting sentences. When this is done in a suitable manner, we can say that T 2 has been reduced to T 1. Successful reductions provide significant increases in our understanding. An especially important type of reduction is a microreduction, which involves explanations of the attributes and behavior of structured wholes in terms of information about their parts and structures. My recent book, Unity of Science (Causey, 1977), contains a detailed explication of the requirements for adequate microreductions, and discusses their role in a general program for the unification of science.

Economists find it increasingly attractive to deal with political behaviour and politico-economic interaction. Those active in this relatively new line of research seem to be convinced that their work is fruitful, although they are prepared to concede that there is much work left to do. This confidence seems to stem from the assessment that the same methodological principles, which have been so successfully applied in economic theory proper, can equally well be used in the neighbouring disciplines of political science and sociology (1). By this I refer to methodological individualism, which holds individual actions to be the adequate starting point of analysis and rational choices to explain those actions.

Karl Popper recommends that when theorizing about the nature of societies and social change we should adopt a standpoint that he refers to as ‘methodological individualism’. Although methodological individualist social theories are individualist theories in some sense, their individualist character should be distinguished from a brand of individualism that Popper, following Husserl, labels ‘psychologist.’ Psychologism, a standpoint that Popper emphatically rejects, is ‘the plausible doctrine that all laws of social life must be ultimately reducible to the psychological laws of “human nature”’1, a standpoint which J.S. Mill adopted when he claimed that ‘all phenomena of society are phenomena of human nature’ so that ‘the Laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the laws of the actions and passions of human beings’2. In taking his stand against psychologism Popper advocates an ‘autonomous sociology’ distinct from psychology.

Neoclassical economics is often thought to need an infusion of social psychology. There are two reasons for this. One is that economics should be able to recognize the social interaction between individual decision-makers; the other is that economics should recognize that the nature of an individual’s utility function is essentially psychological. Both of these criteria involve the methodological requirements of an individualism that is at the foundations of neoclassical economics. In this short chapter I would like to explain why the requirements of methodological individualism do not necessitate an infusion of social psychology.