Efficiency and Individualism

Individualism and Supervenience

Methodological Individualism and Generosity

Today a convergence between the fields of anthropology and economics has re-emerged after decades during which the dictates of methodological individualism, as strikingly elucidated by Kenneth Arrow, had seriously limited and hampered effective scholarship in studies of economic and social development in developing countries. A new generation of development economists represented by Spolaori an...

Individualism, Externalism and Idiolectical Meaning

Semantic externalism in contemporary philosophy of language typically – and often tacitly – combines two supervenience claims about idiolectical meaning (i.e., meaning in the language system of an individual speaker). The first claim is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her intrinsic, physical properties. The second is that the meaning of a wor...

Race, Education, and Individualism Revisited

Current work suggests that individualistic values are more likely to be invoked in judgments about welfare recipients when the latter are black. Nevertheless, this “racialization” hypothesis has yet to be directly tested by looking at whether generalized individualism is more strongly related to hostility toward welfare recipients among whites when the recipients are black. In this paper, I con...

Fregean Sense and Anti-Individualism