Methodological Individualism

168 Positivism in philosophy and social scienceconflicts with the physicalism and behaviourism ofphilosophers. 3most empiricistBritish empiricismIn the history of philosophy, empiricism has been mainly a British affair. Thebeginning is in the Middle Ages with William of Ockham and Roger Bacon. Inthe Renaissance, there was Francis Bacon, sometimes conceived of as the ‘fatherof empiricism’, because of his advocacy of induction. On the threshold to theEnlightenment, Thomas Hobbes defended a kind of empiricism, which incorporatedan important deductive element from Descartes’s rationalism. Britishempiricism culminated with the contributions of the three Enlightenmentphilosophers, John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. After them, JohnStuart Mill was an important bridge between seventeenth and nineteenthcenturyempiricism. Mill, once again, introduced an important element ofdeduction in his empiricist methodology, which makes it very close to that of thelogical positivists.Common to the most important British empiricists is that they believed thatall knowledge derives from sense perception and that sense perception is atomistic.Knowledge is built out of simple ideas of sense-data. These simple ideasare combined into complex ideas, by a psychological mechanism of association.All complex ideas are ultimately collections of simple ideas of sense-data.Complex ideas of social wholes and collectives, in their turn, are collections ofideas about particulars, that is about individuals. In the nineteenth century thisanalysis is turned into the idea that social wholes and collectives are logicalconstructions of individuals – a view which is congenial to most methodologicalindividualists.The idea of logical constructions goes back to Bertrand Russell, whosuggested in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) that matter, physicalobjects, when analysed, turn out to be logical constructions out of sense-data (seealso [1914] 1926: 106). 4 It is not that Russell denies the existence of physicalobjects. His point is rather that if we can construct them logically out of sensedata,there is no need to assume that they exist except as logical constructions.Russell’s method of analysis or logical construction, then, is used to serve themaxim called Ockham’s razor: ‘Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity’,or in Russell’s version; ‘Wherever possible, logical constructions are to besubstituted for inferred entities’ (p. 112). But the method of logical constructionis also a method of justification, since, in a way, our belief in the existence ofphysical objects is justified to the extent that it is possible to replace them bylogical constructions out of sense-data (Pears, 1968: 37f; Ayer, 1971: 40; 1972:11).The reason Russell calls physical objects logical constructions is that they canbe analysed as series of classes of appearances or sense-data, and series andclasses are things that belong to logic ([1914] 1926: 111, 128; [1917] 1963: