Abstract

Methodological individualists often claim that any social phenomenon can ultimately be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. Any Nagelian version of methodological individualism requires that there be bridge laws that translate social statements into individualistic ones. We show that Nagelian individualism can be put to logical scrutiny by making the relevant social and individualistic languages fully explicit and mathematically precise. In particular, we prove that the social statement that a group of (at least two) agents performs a deontically admissible group action cannot be expressed in a well-established deontic logic of agency that models every combination of actions, omissions, abilities, and obligations of finitely many individual agents.

Highlights

  • Methodological individualists often claim that any social phenomenon can be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals.1 This reductionist thesis does not follow from the associated ontological thesis, according to which every social entity consists of individual entities and their interrelations

  • Any Nagelian version of methodological individualism requires that there be bridge laws that translate social statements into individualistic ones

  • We prove that the social statement that a group of agents performs a deontically admissible group action cannot be expressed in a well-established deontic logic of agency that models every combination of actions, omissions, abilities, and obligations of finitely many individual agents

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Summary

Introduction

Methodological individualists often claim that any social phenomenon can be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. This reductionist thesis does not follow from the associated ontological thesis, according to which every social entity consists of individual entities and their interrelations. Two statements are nomologically co-extensive if and only if their extensions are the same in all possible worlds where the relevant background laws hold.) A necessary condition for a bridge law is that the social statement to be translated must be logically or at least nomologically equivalent to its individualistic translation: they must be true under exactly the same circumstances, where the range of relevant circumstances might be restricted by individualistic background laws.5 These philosophical considerations on the expressive power of individualistic languages in the social sciences can be made precise by adopting a logical point of view. It does not: there might be individualistic languages other than the one used in this paper that allow for a bridge law translating collective deontic admissibility statements. 5, we establish our impossibility result: there are no bridge laws that translate collective deontic admissibility statements into the individualistic language Li. Lastly, in Sect. Constants for collective deontic admissibility were first introduced by Tamminga et al (forthcoming). 8 Bacharach’s (1999, 2006) and Sugden’s (1993, 2000, 2003) accounts of ‘team-reasoning’ are closely related to Tuomela’s (2013) study of ‘we-reasoning’. Bacharach (2006, p. 121) writes: ‘‘Roughly, somebody ‘team-reasons’ if she works out the best feasible combination of actions for all the members of her team, does her part in it.’’

Language and semantics
A social language and its individualistic sublanguage
Deontic game models
When are there no bridge laws?
Individualistic bisimilarity and two constructions
Individualistic bisimilarity
Two constructions
The unit transform
The zero transform
An impossibility result
Future research
Full Text
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