Abstract

Sociology aims to explain the emergence, persistence, and change of larger-scale social events, entities, properties, and processes. A vital element of this explanatory task is to connect the larger-scale changes to smaller-scale social properties and processes. Philosophers of social science usually employ the idea of a level to analyze the relation between macro and micro, which leads to misunderstanding the sociological micro-macro problem. Philosophical arguments often assimilate the micro-macro challenge into the problem of methodological individualism and treat it as analogical to the relation between the physical and the mental. This presupposes that there is an individual level that is unique, comprehensive, and privileged, but these conditions are not satisfied. As an alternative, one should pay attention to the pragmatics of the micro-macro distinction, which is flexible, local, and relative. Once this is taken seriously, the motivation for assuming levels vanishes.Levels thinking creates problem substitutions rather than problem solutions. Furthermore, it supports a sterile style of theorizing. As an alternative, the paper suggests thinking about micro and macro in terms of scale and recognizing their heterogeneity. The concept of level is a placeholder, rather than as a theoretical concept. While figuring out relations between micro and macro is vital in the social sciences, it can be practiced without postulating levels. The paper concludes that a skeptical strategy towards levels is justified in the social sciences as the concept is heuristically misleading. To sustain necessary conceptual vigilance, social scientists should adopt the meta-heuristic of avoiding it.