Methodological Holism Versus Individualism

This entry speaks to the nature of the individual element. Individualism says that the individual element is an independent entity that has self-contained properties, although of course it draws on resources around it. An example is the popular idea that the individual is responsible for his or her own fate. One's success and failure depend ultimately on how hard one works.

Holism says that the individual element is inextricably tied to other individuals. Individuals are interdependent, and they are internally related in the sense that each is imbued with and constituted by the qualities of others. An example is a child in a family. The child's psychology depends utterly on the way he or she is treated. Any intrinsic tendencies are modulated and mediated by experience. From this perspective, the child is not entirely responsible for his or her behavior.

Holism regards individuals or elements as reciprocally influencing each other. The child affects the family while being affected by it. This dialectical relation of individuals and elements comprises a system, or a whole. The whole is composed of individuals and affected by them. It is not independent of individuals. However, the whole is not simply a sum of independent individuals sequentially summed together, one after the other. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

Solomon Asch explains the holistic nature of social interactions in the case of two boys carrying a log. The boys adjust their actions to each other and to the object. The two do not apply force separately. There is a unity of action that embraces the participants and the common object. This performance is a new product, unlike what each participant would do singly and also unlike the sum of their separate exertions. What each contributes is a function of his relation to the other and how the other acts. The other's actions lead to changes in the self's behavior. Self is permeated by other. Larger social units, such as teams and institutions, manifest other kinds of emergent properties.

Emergence is central to holism. It denotes that the whole is different from the sum of the individual constituents. This whole then affects the qualities of the constituents. They are not self-sufficient, independent qualities.

These examples illustrate how the two approaches construe the nature, or existence, of the individual. These ontological perspectives of individualism and holism entail corresponding epistemologies, or ways of acquiring knowledge.

An ontology that construes individual elements as self-contained and self-determining and as combining arithmetically to form groups necessarily insists that knowledge of things consists of reducing complexity to simple, separate individual elements—for example, a group is simply a collection of individuals coexisting. An ontology that construes elements as part of a system of relations that constitute them insists that knowledge of things requires understanding elements as complex, multifaceted entities that are dialectically related to other things and embody their features

Individualistic and holistic ontologies and epistemologies also entail distinctive methodologies.