Hansson Wahlberg, Tobias (2017) Why the Social Sciences are Irreducible. [Preprint]

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Abstract

It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lower-level individualistic science. The standard argument for this position (usually labelled explanatory holism) is the Fodorian multiple realizability argument. Its defenders endorse token-token(s) identities between “higher-level” social objects and pluralities/sums of “lower-level” individuals (a position traditionally called ontological individualism), but they maintain that the properties expressed by social science predicates are often multiply realizable, entailing that type-type identities between social and individualistic properties are ruled out. In this paper I argue that the multiple realizability argument for explanatory holism is unsound. The social sciences are indeed irreducible, but the principled reason for this is that the required token-token(s) identifications cannot in general be carried through. In consequence, paradigmatic social science predicates cannot be taken to apply to the objects quantified over in the lower-level sciences. The result is that typical social science predicates cannot even be held to be co-extensive with individualistic predicates, which means type-type identifications are ruled out too. Multiple realizability has nothing to do with this failure of co-extensiveness, because the relevant social science predicates are not multiply realized in the sense intended by the explanatory holists, a sense which presupposes reductive token-token(s) identifications.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Hansson Wahlberg, Tobias 0000-0001-5079-752X
Keywords:	Explanatory holism · Explanatory individualism · Reduction · Composition as identity · Ontological individualism · Multiple realization
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Economics General Issues > Reductionism/Holism Specific Sciences > Sociology
Depositing User:	Dr. Tobias Hansson Wahlberg
Date Deposited:	15 Mar 2018 15:43
Last Modified:	15 Mar 2018 15:43
Item ID:	14472
Official URL:	https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-0...
DOI or Unique Handle:	10.1007/s11229-017-1472-2
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Economics General Issues > Reductionism/Holism Specific Sciences > Sociology
Date:	2017
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/14472

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