Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

Intentional Fundamentalism
Petri Ylikoski / Jaakko Kuorikoski, Helsinki, Finland
1. What is Intentional Fundamentalism?
In the social sciences, most debates about reductionism
are related to methodological individualism. There is a
wide variety of arguments for this doctrine. This paper
discusses one assumption often associated with methodological
individualism. We call this assumption intentional
fundamentalism. According to intentional fundamentalism,
the proper level of explanation in social science is the level
of intentional action of individual agents. Intentional fundamentalist
assumes that explanations given at the level
of individual action are especially satisfactory, fundamental
or even ultimate. In contrast to explanations that refer to
supra-individual social structures, properties or mechanism,
there is no need to provide micro-foundations for
intentional explanations. French social theorist Raymond
Boudon (1998, 177) expresses this idea clearly: ”When a
sociological phenomenon is made the outcome of individual
reasons, one does not need to ask further questions”.
The idea is that in the case of supra-individual explanations
there is always a black box that has to be opened
before the explanation is acceptable, but in the case if
intentional explanation there is no problem of black boxes:
” … the explanation is final” (Boudon 1998, 172).
We argue that the thesis of intentional
fundamentalism is not acceptable. Although intentional
fundamentalism can take various forms, we will discuss it
only in relation to rational choice theory (RCT). We claim
that the special status of (rational) intentional explanation
is not compatible with the causal mechanistic account of
explanation supported by many intentional
fundamentalists. We will also make the case that the
explanatory regress arguments presented against the
possibility of non-individualistic social explanations rely on
mistaken assumptions about the nature of explanation.
It is important to recognize the limited scope of our
arguments. We are not arguing against the legitimacy of
intentional explanations nor are we presenting a wholesale
argument against the RCT. We only argue against a
special explanatory status given to explanations expressed
in terms of rational intentional action. We do not dispute
the heuristic usefulness and practical necessity of
explanations in terms of folk psychology. Adequate
intentional explanations are fully legitimate causal
explanations – they just do not have a privileged status.
Furthermore, our argument should not be read as an
argument against the idea that there exists a division of
labor between the social sciences and psychology and
neurosciences. This idea is unobjectionable as long as
intentional fundamentalism is not the only argument
supporting it.
Our argument will proceed as follows. First we will
show the connection between intentional fundamentalism
and the explanatory regress argument for methodological
individualism. We argue that the proper understanding of
the mechanistic account of explanation does not lead to an
explanatory regress. If the regress does not exist, the
intentional fundamentalism loses its main motivation. In
latter part of the paper we will attempt to explain the
appeal of intentional fundamentalism by showing how it is
based on overemphasis on one particular dimension of
explanatory power: cognitive salience. Intentional
fundamentalists assume that different dimension of
explanatory power go hand in hand when in fact there are
important trade-offs between them. These trade-offs
provide the basis for the argument that intentional
fundamentalism is a hindrance for the search of causal
explanations in the social sciences.
2. The Regress of Explanations-Argument
Methodological individualists usually argue for their position
by making the case that non-individualist explanations
are either explanatorily deficient or not explanatory at all.
At most, the individualists allow that explanations referring
to macro-social facts are placeholders for proper (individualistic)
explanatory factors. The explanatory contribution of
supra-individual explanations is at-best derived: they are
explanatory because they are (in principle) backed up by a
truly explanatory story. This is the regress of explanations
argument: unless grounded at the lower level, explanations
at macro level are not acceptable. The underlying
general principle [P] is the following: a genuine explanation
of X by Y requires that Y is itself explained or is selfexplanatory.
The explanatory buck has to stop somewhere.
In principle this argument is general, and it raises
the possibility that the regress would continue until the
level of fundamental physical particles. This would be
highly unintuitive, but for the intentional fundamentalist the
buck stops at the level of (self-interested) rational
intentional action. This level is treated as inherently
understandable, as shown in the above quotations from
Boudon. The special status of intentional explanation
makes the explanatory regress argument safe for
methodological individualist: he can use it with its full force
against non-idividualist, but it does not challenge the
legitimacy of his favorite explanatory patterns. In contrast,
structural explanations seem suspect as they do not have
a similar privileged status. The inherent intelligibility of
intentional action explains why the reductivist search for
microfoundations should stop at the level of the individual.
In our view, this argument fails. First, the
explanatory regress argument does not work as the
methodological individualist assumes. Second, intentional
explanation does not have the special properties the
intentional fundamentalist presumes it to have.
The regress argument does not work because the
presupposed principle [P] is not true. The explanatory
relation between X and Y is independent from the question
whether Y is itself explained. Belief in [P] might arise from
the confusion of between justification-seeking and
explanation-seeking why-questions. However, it might also
arise from other (false) intuitions about explanation. One
such intuition is that total understanding is not really
increased if the puzzlement concerning the original
explanandum is simply replaced with new puzzlement
concerning the explanans. Some fifty years ago, Stephen
Toulmin appealed to this intuition to argue that all sciences
must presuppose an inherently understandable “ideal of
natural order” (Toulmin 1961, 42). For methodological
individualists the rational (self-interested) action serves in
the role of ideal of natural order (Coleman & Fararo 1992,
xiv). The same intuition underlines Michael Friedman’s
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