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There are a number of ways in which this idea of inter-theoretical reduction can be spelled out. When Mill makes the claim that the laws of the social sciences will always be reducible to the laws of psychology, he likely had something like the following in mind. Suppose that there is a law of collective psychology that takes the following form. If a

corporation, C, fears a decrease in its profit margin. D, it will change its marketing strategy, M, ceteris paribus. If Mill’s thesis about the reduction of collective psychology to individual psychology is correct, then we will need a series of bridge laws such that:

1) Cx  P1x 2) Dx  P2x 3) Mx  P3x

where ‘P1x’, ‘P2y’, and ‘P3x’ are predicates of psychology. These laws are called bridge laws because they contain predicates of both the higher-level collective psychology and the lower- level individual psychology and are thus capable of bridging the gap between the higher- level and the lower-level sciences. However, to complete the reduction, there must also be a law of psychology such that:

4) P1x•P2xP3x

If this sort of picture is correct, then any law that includes an apparently collective psychological phenomena will be related to a law at the level of individual psychology such that if we knew all of the laws of psychology and all of the bridge laws, we could, thereby, explain the apparently collective psychological states of a system in terms of the psychological regularities that underwrite that collective behavior. Such reductions were the wildest dreams of the positivists. However, there are serious, and well-known problems with adopting such a reductionist project.

On the reasonably untendentious assumption that laws must range over natural kind predicates,55 the sort of reduction posited here comes out to be far too strong. So, suppose that the predicates picked out in the antecedents and consequents in (1) through (4) are

55 _{If you’re worried about the natural kind talk here, you can feel free to replace it with something more}

amenable to your empiricist proclivities. I’m inclined to think that the same argument will go through even on the minimal assumption that the predicates used in scientific laws must be projectable predicates rather than gerrymandered, gruesome predicates. I’ll run it in terms of natural kinds; however, since I’m borrowing the argument from Fodor (1980) and that’s the way that he does it.

supposed to be natural kind predicates. While it might indeed be true that it’s possible to spell out notions like ‘profit margin’, ‘corporation’ and, ‘marketing strategy’ at the level of economics, sociology or cultural anthropology, it seems reasonable to assume that these notions will not be realized on anything that looks like a natural kind at the level of individual psychology. After all, these are functional kinds if anything is. So, while an individual may play a key role in designing a marketing strategy in response to a change in profit margin, she does so only in her role as a member of a corporation.

To put the criticism another way, there are numerous psychological attitudes that any particular individual within the corporation can adopt toward the development of a marketing plan without affecting the eventual outcome. Given that this is the case, we actually do find the sorts of counterfactual stabilities that Mill claimed were absent at the level of collective psychology. Suppose someone who is involved in the production of a marketing plan for Wine and Co. is lambasted by a supervisor for failing to wear a Hawaiian shirt on the second Friday of the month. She might, given her everlasting hatred of tropical climates, adopt the policy of attempting to undercut the corporation by producing the worst marketing plan she can possibly muster. Fortunately for Wine and Co., however, there are structures in place to mitigate breakdowns in the functional architecture of the corporation. Despite her best efforts to the contrary, a viable marketing plan may emerge because her supervisors might see that her version of the marketing plan, recognize that it looks miserable, and thereby redirect the project so as to allow another person to produce a more viable plan for increasing profits.56 Alternatively, the same person could decide that she ought to become more of ‘team player’

56 _{If V.S. Ramachandran (1988) is right, then something similar occurs across a broad range of neurological}

breakdowns in individuals. Areas of cytoarchitecture that would typically play one role in the functional architecture of a person are recruited in order to do the work of some area that is damaged, and so if failing to perform it’s standard function. Perhaps the most interesting cases here are Ramachandran’s studies on phantom limb pain.

and might decide that producing a viable marketing plan is the best way to begin—in the end producing a relevantly similar and viable marketing plan.

Psychological states of corporations, if there are such things, are often produced in a way that is resistant to local breakdowns; they, thereby, exhibit counterfactual stability across variations in the psychological states of the individuals that compose these collectivities. The distribution of cognitive tasks across a number of individual psychological systems, at least as this occurs in the most interesting cases of collective mental states, facilitates the realization of a particular psychological state of a collectivity on a variety of different individual psychological bases. Thus, just as we should be unwilling to engage in a straightforward type reduction of the mental states of an individual to her neural architecture because the kinds that are present at the psychological level are multiply realized on different, heterogeneous neural structures, we should be unwilling to engage in a straightforward type reduction of collective psychological states to individual psychological states because these states are multiply realized on a variety of heterogeneous individual psychological states. The important point here is that the counterfactual stability of things like corporate beliefs, marketing plans, and the like guarantees that they will not be straightforwardly reducible by conceptual means to the natural kinds of individual psychology.

Any attempt to reduce collective psychological phenomena to individual psychological phenomena is going to be faced with the fact that although collective entities like a decreased profit margin are well behaved at the level of collective psychology, the psychological states that realize the movement of capital and the decisions to act on the movement of capital will be wildly disjunctive and completely unprojectable at the level of

individual psychology. There is a nearly infinite set of ways in which profit margins can fluctuate, and as such, the psychological attitudes directed towards these fluctuations would themselves be nearly infinite. The point is a familiar point against the straightforward reduction of the laws of one science to the laws of another science. This suggests, however, that the initial way of spelling out Mill’s reductive project is likely to fail; yet the claim that we should expect the a priori deduction of the laws of the special sciences to something more primitive continues to have a great deal of currency.