Can Groups Do Things, or Is It All Just People?
A Riot in the Square
Imagine a rumor spreads through a city: the government plans to cut school meals. The next morning, a huge crowd fills the main square, chanting and waving signs. Why did the protest break out?
You could answer by pointing to the government’s unfair plan. The plan made people angry, and anger led to a protest. That explanation talks about social phenomena — things like rules, cultures, and group moods. Or you could answer by tracing what happened inside each person: one student heard the rumor, texted her friends, they all felt furious, each chose to march, and together their footsteps filled the square. That explanation sticks to individuals — their beliefs, desires, and actions.
These two ways of looking at the world sit at the heart of a long-running fight in the philosophy of science. When we explain something social, can we treat groups, cultures, and patterns as real causes? Or should we always dig down to the story of each single person? This is the dispensability debate — the question of whether holist explanations (explanations that use social ideas) can ever be thrown away and replaced entirely by individualist explanations (explanations that use only individuals). And from it grew a second argument, the microfoundations debate, about whether even good holist stories always need to show the tiny human gears inside.
Looking at the Crowd or Counting Every Face
The first camp is methodological holism. A holist thinks that social phenomena — things like governments, economic growth, a school’s dress code, a nation’s literacy rate, or the rules about which side of the road cars drive on — can be used to explain why social events happen. Strong holism says only those group-level stories are allowed; individual ones should be abandoned. But almost no one today holds that extreme view. Nearly all modern holists are moderate holists. They think both holist and individualist explanations are needed. The real fight is between moderate holism and methodological individualism, the view that only individual-level explanations are ever necessary, and holist ones can eventually be thrown away.
The early roots of the fight reach back to Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who argued that social facts cause social facts in their own right, and Max Weber (1864–1920), who stressed understanding individual people’s reasons for acting. By the 1950s, thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper were defending individualism hard, while Maurice Mandelbaum (1908–1987) and others pushed back, arguing that holist explanations survive the attack. The debate flared again in the 1980s and is still unfolding today, with philosophers like Harold Kincaid, Frank Jackson, and Philip Pettit offering new ammunition for the holist side.
A tricky part of the argument is deciding what even counts as a social phenomenon. Holists say it includes organizations, cultures, statistical rates, social roles (like “bus driver”), and norms. Individualists often reply that some of those — especially roles and norms — are really just facts about many individuals’ beliefs, so they should be classified as individual properties. Because of this boundary dispute, the two sides sometimes talk past each other: one person’s holist explanation is another person’s individualist one.
Why Some Think Group Explanations Are Irreplaceable
Moderate holists have developed several clever arguments to show that we cannot get rid of holist explanations. One relies on the idea that social phenomena themselves can be causes. Imagine a major climate summit in Copenhagen in 2010 that collapsed in disagreement. Philosophers Christian List and Kai Spiekermann suggest that the failure was caused by a social property of the meeting: there were too many countries with no common interest. Even if the particular diplomats had been different people, the same group-level property would have still caused the breakdown. The group fact makes a systematic difference — it is what genuinely does the causing. A list of every individual’s thoughts would not capture that.
This works because group properties supervene on individuals: if the people change, the group property also changes. But the same group property can be multiply realizable — it can be built out of many different mixtures of individual properties. A church, for example, can be made from people with very different beliefs, habits, and relationships in different cultures. Because a church doesn’t rely on one single arrangement of individuals, you cannot replace “church” with any one fixed individual-level description. You need the holist term.
A related argument was offered by Maurice Mandelbaum way back in 1955. He pointed out that some social concepts cannot be translated into purely individual concepts without leaving an important leftover. Think of a bank teller. To define what a teller is, you must mention a bank. But a bank involves concepts like “legal tender” and “contract,” which in turn involve more social concepts. You can never finish the translation using only talk about individuals’ private thoughts. So holist explanations that use such social concepts cannot be swapped out for individualist ones.
The Never-Ending Ladder of Explanations
Individualists sometimes say holist stories are worse because they look at big units instead of the smaller pieces — individuals — that make them up. But moderate holists have a sharp reply. If we must always prefer the smaller pieces, then why stop at individuals? Shouldn’t we demand explanations about people’s brain cells? And then the chemical reactions inside those cells? And then the atoms? If we kept going, we’d chase an infinite regress and never give a satisfying explanation of anything social. Since that would be absurd, the demand itself can’t be right. This regress argument doesn’t tell us exactly when holist explanations are best, but it shows that the general rule “always dig to the individual” is unreasonable. So we can keep using group-level stories without guilt.
Two Different Stories: The Crime Wave
Frank Jackson (born 1943) and Philip Pettit (born 1945) added another famous argument. They imagine a rise in crime after a jump in unemployment. A holist explanation says: rising unemployment caused rising crime. An individualist explanation says: individual A lost his job, became frustrated, and broke into a car; individual B lost hers, felt hopeless, and sold drugs; and so on. Both explanations can be true, but they provide different kinds of information.
The holist version tells you something about many possible worlds: whenever unemployment shoots up, crime tends to follow, no matter exactly which individuals are affected. It gives modally comparative information — it compares our world to close possible worlds. The individualist version picks out the particular chain of events that actually happened in this world; it gives modally contrastive information. Because we sometimes want to know the general pattern rather than the specific saga, the holist story is indispensable. You cannot get that comparative insight from the individual story alone.
Do Group Stories Need to Show the Tiny Gears?
Even if holist explanations are worth keeping, a further question appears: when you give a purely holist explanation — one that moves from one social fact to another without mentioning individuals at all — do you always have to add the underlying microfoundations, the chain of individual actions and thoughts that connect them? Many philosophers, especially from the 1980s onward, said yes. They used the boat model, made famous by James Coleman: to explain how one social fact leads to another, you must go down to the individual deck (how the social fact shaped people’s beliefs and opportunities), across (how they then acted), and back up (how those actions produced a new social fact). Without that, they claimed, the explanation is incomplete.
But moderate holists disagree. One powerful reply uses contrastive why-questions. The philosopher Jeroen Van Bouwel asks: why did the French Revolution break out in 1789, and not in 1750? A good answer points to large structural conditions — the French state was economically weak in 1789 because of expensive wars and growing competition — that were absent in 1750. Adding a step-by-step tale of individual psychology would not make that comparison any better. So purely holist explanations can stand on their own when we ask contrastive questions.
Another reply: sometimes the same large-scale cause works through many different individual pathways. An increase in the money supply tends to push prices up, but how it does so varies from one shopkeeper’s decision to another. A purely holist explanation that just appeals to the economic tendency covers all cases, while a micro-detailed story only fits one. For that reason, keeping the explanation at the group level is sometimes more useful.
Why It Matters When You Explain Your School
You face questions like this every day. Why did your friend group suddenly start using a new slang word? Why does your school have a rule about backpacks? You could point to something about the group — a trend, a shared mood, an unwritten norm — or you could trace the decision through every single person’s ideas. Neither level is obviously the whole truth. Philosophers of science still argue about where to stop the camera, because where you stop changes what you see. The debate over holism and individualism reminds us that explanation is a choice: do we want the wide shot of the crowd or the close-up of each face? Sometimes, to really understand, you need both.
Think about it
- Imagine a school suddenly bans hats. If you explain it by saying “the principal wanted order,” is that enough, or should you find out what every teacher and parent thought?
- A sports team wins a championship. Is it better to say “they had great teamwork,” or to list every pass and play? Which explanation tells you more about why they won?
- If a swarm of bees attacks, is it more useful to say “the hive felt threatened” or to track each bee’s brain? Could both be true at the same time?
