Individualism and Holism Are Contradictory Doctrines Questions

Answer the three questions throughly and make sure to completely answer it to make it look like you understood the questions. Write 4 sentences for each question showing you read the text. READING IS CHAPTER 9

Questions:

1. Individualism and holism are contradictory doctines. The former urges social scientists to study the causes and effects of the behavior of individuals, and the latter those of social groups or institutions.Do reductionists in social science favor individualism or holism?

2. Rosenberg introduces (p.181) Durkheim’s explanation of the statistics of suicide. Durkheim argues that we need to posit the existence of social facts because otherwise we cannot explain an increase of suicidal rate.  Rosenberg thinks this argument for social facts is better than the argument in the earlier section (p.177-180) that explanation of an individual human action presupposes social facts. In what sense is Durkheim’s argument better?

3. On p.191-2, Rosenberg uses the example of “chair” to illustrate the notion of supervenience and multiple realizability: “chairs are higher-level entities that supervene on lower-level ones”. And “being a chair is multiply realized.” How do these facts tell us about the possibility of reducing chairs to more basic physical properties of the material that contitute chair?