Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate by Julie Zahle & Finn Collin

Author:Julie Zahle & Finn Collin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

7.5 The Diversity of Social Macro Properties

One of the implicit assumptions of the traditional debate is that social macro properties are homogenous. When the debate is conducted at the abstract level of S and I predicates and without real social scientific examples, this may go easily unnoticed. For the same reason, people have not recognized that social macro facts are actually quite difficult to think of in terms of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ levels. In this Section I describe how the scale-based approach could naturally replace the metaphorical -levels discussion.

The diversity of social macro properties is a quite unexplored area in philosophy of the social sciences. We do not have a satisfactory classification of different sorts of social macro properties. However, it is useful to have some sort of preliminary taxonomy of macro social facts. Thus I employ the classification proposed in Ylikoski (2012). While it is still an open issue whether this scheme is ultimately satisfactory, it can be used to demonstrate the heterogeneity of social macro properties and to make the case for the relative fruitfulness of the scale-based approach in analyzing their role in explanations.

Ylikoski (2012) classifies social macro properties into four classes: (1) the statistical properties of a population; (2) the networks of relations within a population; (3) the communal properties; and (4) the properties of organizations. In what follows, I will first briefly describe each case and consider how cogent the competing conceptualizations actually are in capturing their specifics.

When methodological individualists discuss social macro facts, they often have in mind the statistical properties of a population (Ylikoski 2012: 28–29). These describe the distributions and frequencies of properties within a given population. The facts about distributions describe how certain attributes are distributed among members of a population or how individuals with certain attributes are distributed among social positions and spatial locations. The facts about frequencies specify the attributes, behaviors, or beliefs that are typical, rare, dominant, or marginal within the population. These properties seem rather unproblematic. The are based on data that may be from pre-existing registers or which are derived from surveys. The data tell about the individual attributes, and the macro properties are inferred (or estimated) from these data points. Thus they are logically continuous with the individual attributes (Pettit 1993: 121). It is no wonder that individualists do not usually find these properties to be threatening. The only problem is with the individual properties themselves. For example, unemployment is an institutional status that cannot be understood as an intrinsic property of an individual. However, we can pass over this problem in the context here.

Is it possible to think about statistical properties in terms higher and lower levels? The first thing to note is that because statistical properties are in principle based only on an aggregation of individual properties, it would be easy to think of them as ‘individual-level’ properties. The problem is that while this stipulation gives an easy (partial) victory to the traditional individualist, it misses the contrast between micro and macro. Thus all micro-macro problems simply become invisible.

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