Methodological individualism considered as a constitutive principle of scientific inquiry

The issue of methodological solipsism in the philosophy of mind and psychology has received enormous attention and discussion in the decade since the appearance of Jerry Fodor's (1980) Methodological solipsism. But most of this discussion has focused on the consideration of the now infamous ‘Twin Earth’ type examples and the problems they present for Fodor's notion of ‘narrow content’. I think there is deeper and more general moral to be found in this issue, particularly in light of Fodor's more recent defense of his view in Psychosemantics (Fodor, 1987). Underlying this discussion are questions about the nature and plausibility of the claim that scientific explanation should observe a constraint of methodological individualism. My goal in what follows is to bring out this more general problem in Fodor's ‘internalist’ account of the mental. My interest here lies in part in the role which a misuse of ‘methodological individualism’ plays in Fodor's arguments about psychological taxonomy. But I will also use this as a kind of case study for examining the larger questions of individualism and context‐dependence in scientific explanation. I will thus be taking this as an opportunity to offer a suggestion which I see as having significantly more general application in clarifying the use and misuse of such notions in the philosophy of science. Roughly, I will claim that by making the appropriate explicit connections between the ideal of locality and levels of organization in the higher‐level sciences, we can make clear that fallacy in a particular kind of argument which is sometimes offered in support of an individualistic position in various domains.