Tedesco, Marcelo S. (2025) From Individuals to Persons in a Panarchic Social Ontology. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Contemporary social theory and economics still take the “individual” as a basic ontological unit, even when they adopt systemic and emergentist vocabularies. I argue that this shared presupposition underlies both refined versions of methodological individualism and many of their holist critiques, and that it produces what I call an “emergence without ontology” of the individual. Drawing on complex systems theory, emergentist systemism, and recent work in social ontology, I develop a panarchic framework in which persons replace individuals as the basic units of analysis, understood as bio–social–ecological complex systems whose agency is an emergent property of nested configurations. I elaborate this view by reconstructing how the social sciences conceptualize the individual, showing why existing critiques fail to challenge its ontological status, and specifying how agency can be understood as a systemic property of person–systems. I close by outlining how this panarchic ontology reshapes debates on individualism and holism and reframes explanatory practice in social theory, economics, and public policy.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Keywords: | social ontology, methodological individualism, holism, complexity, emergence, personhood, panarchy | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Economics General Issues > Science and Society General Issues > Science and Policy Specific Sciences > Sociology |
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| Depositing User: | Dr. Marcelo S. Tedesco | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 01 Jan 2026 13:40 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 01 Jan 2026 13:40 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 27677 | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Economics General Issues > Science and Society General Issues > Science and Policy Specific Sciences > Sociology |
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| Date: | 31 December 2025 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/27677 |
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