Abstract
After opening with some metaphilosophical preliminaries sketching a naturalist framework that guides the paper, I devote my discussion to identifying dead and live issues in the traditional individualism-holism debate. The third section discusses standard reductionist theses about theory reduction. Arguments given for and against such claims has been conceptual in nature and thus to my mind misguided. However, the empirical evidence against reducibility now seems overwhelming. More dead ends will be the topic of the fourth section, where I will discuss claims that society does not exist and claims that social mechanisms require accounts in terms of individuals. In the last Section I look at numerous places in the social sciences where there are interesting open issues around the individualism-holism controversy. Those issues are about how holist or individualist we must or can be in senses I specify. The live issues in the individualism-holism debate are not global ones to be decided on general conceptual grounds but local and contextual empirical debates about how far we can get by proceeding without institutional and social detail.
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