Failures of Methodological Individualism: The Materiality of Social Systems.

Traditional functionalists in social science, for example, Spencer ([64]), Parsons ([54]), Radcliffe-Brown ([56]), Malinowski ([44]), viewed society on the model of an integrated organism whose parts functioned to meet basic human needs and maintain the society's survival and stability. And shouldn't we include social systems such as transportation systems, medical systems, military systems, and educational systems; after all, these are the subject matter of the social sciences. I IntroductionMethodological individualism i (MI) has been a major topic in the philosophy of social science over the past several decades. In the final sections, I sketch an account of how we might distinguish social systems from other (non-social) systems, and argue that prioritizing the level of systems in social ontology has advantages for social critique. (Kukla and Lance 2014, 26) A social ontology suited to understanding social systems, then, must include the worldly components upon which our attitudes and activities depend; and social explanations will typically be incomplete without including the worldly constraints on the systems we are part of. [Extracted from the article]