11 May 2023, The Utrecht Logic in Progress Series (TULIPS), Hein Duijf

Abstract: Methodological individualism is the position that all social phenomena are to be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. Most prominent theories of explanation require the existence of a logical regularity between the explanandum and explananda. In this talk, we show that methodological individualism can be put to logical scrutiny by making the social and individualistic languages fully explicit and mathematically precise. In particular, we combine game theory with formal logic to argue against methodological individualism: we prove that there are no reductive explanations of the statement that a group maximizes expected utility using statements in an individualistic formal language that can be used to model actions, omissions, abilities, and expected utility maximization of finitely many individual agents. (Joint work with Frederik Van De Putte)