Methodological individualism, stripped of interpretive justification, amounts to a claim about what the social world really consists of

The problem that this creates for the doctrine of methodological individualism is readily apparent. A social science that aims at interpretation, or that uses interpretation as part of the centerpiece of its explanatory strategy, has a very clear methodological reason for privileging explanations that refer to individual actions – since it is precisely the underlying intentional states that serve as the object of interpretation. But if social scientists are merely in the business of providing ca