Methodological Individualism

176 Positivism in philosophy and social sciencescientific statements, or predictions made on their basis, must be compared with,or ‘assayed’ by, observation statements, but even so, he denies a privileged statusto observation reports expressed by protocol sentences. Neurath denounces as ametaphysical fiction an ideal language constructed out of pure atomic sentences.There are, according to him, no immediate and atomic experiences, which canserve as basic elements of the system. Nor are there any atomic sentences whichare primitive relative to other sentences, which can serve as primitive protocolsentences, and which are exempted from verification. All sentences of theuniversal slang of unified science are on an equal footing.There is no way of taking conclusively established pure protocol sentences as the startingpoint of the sciences. No tabula rasa exists. We are like sailors who must rebuildtheir ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and toreconstruct it there out of the best materials. Only the metaphysicalelements can be allowed to vanish without trace. Vague linguistic conglomerationsalways remain in one way or another as components of the ship. Ifvagueness is diminished at one point, it may well be increased at another.(Neurath [1932/3] 1959: 201)This metaphor was later to become famous, and the view of scientific theory itdiscloses has won wide acclaim. The modern, more elaborated, version is the socalled‘holistic view of scientific theories’, suggested by Willard van OrmanQuine (1961: 40–2). Some version of this holistic view of scientific theories istoday accepted by most philosophers of science. It is even assimilated as a part ofthe so-called ‘standard’ (Hempel, 1970), ‘orthodox’ (Feigl, 1970), or ‘received’(Suppe [1973] 1977: 16ff), view of scientific theories, which represents the laststage in the development of logical positivism. According to this view, scientifictheories consist of axiomatic, or hypothetico-deductive, systems of scientificconcepts and laws, more or less general. At the top of the system, there are primitive(undefined) terms and axioms. From these axioms are deduced laws oflesser generality, called theorems. At the bottom of the system, some terms areoperationally defined, by means of some measurement procedure.One of the most clear and succinct statements of the logical positivist orthodoxy,by a social scientist, is Hans Zetterberg’s On Theory and Verification in Sociology(1963). 10 In this work, it is assumed that the primitive or undefined terms of sociologicaltheory are such as denote individual human beings and their actions.Pareto and Weber, as well as most contemporary social theorists, haveassumed that the building blocks of sociological definitions are terms thatdenote human beings and their actions. The rationale for this choice isfound in a suggestive analogy between the position of ‘action’ in all modernsociological theorizing, and the position of ‘primitive terms’ in anytaxonomy. The sociologists say that all social events consist of combinationsof human beings and their actions. The logicians say that all terms of atheory can ultimately be defined by combinations of primitive terms. It