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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Methodological individualism lacks a clear methodological rationale when social science aims only at causal explanation rather than interpretation

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Interpretive social science has a methodological reason to privilege individual actions because intentional states are the object of interpretation
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    • 2.If social scientists are merely providing causal explanations like natural scientists, there is no longer a methodological reason to privilege individual actions
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Causal explanation in social science targets regularities and mechanisms, not the intentional structure of individual agency that grounds individualist reduction.
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    • 2.Macro-level social mechanisms (e.g., market equilibria, institutional path dependence) can be causally efficacious without decomposing into individual-level intentional states.
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    • 3.Philosophers like Jaegwon Kim show that higher-level causal explanations are legitimate when they pick out causal powers not captured at lower levels of description.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.In the causal-explanatory framework, the relevant units of analysis are determined by which variables best predict and explain outcomes, not by ontological priority of persons.
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    • 2.Statistical and structural causal models (Pearl, Woodward) identify causes at whatever level of aggregation yields stable interventionist relationships, which may be supra-individual.
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