Methodological Individualism and Agent-Based Models: A Reply to Manzo

In this chapter, I focus on the stimulating and enriching contribution published by Gianluca Manzo in this handbook under the title “Agent-based models and methodological individualism: are they fundamentally linked?” The purpose is to reply to the constructive criticism that he leveled at an article entitled “On the Connection Between Agent-Based Simulation and Methodological Individualism” that I coauthored with Shu-Heng Chen. Manzo agrees with the main conclusion of our article, which is that there is a clearly identifiable link between these two approaches. However, he disagrees with the line of reasoning that we have developed to support this conclusion. My objective is to show that Manzo’s criticism is based on a misunderstanding of our argumentative strategy that may stem from the fact that we did not clarify some implicit relevant methodological assumptions of our analysis. In this chapter, I shall attempt to elucidate and make explicit these assumptions to demonstrate that the distance between Manzo’s and our line of reasoning is less than it may appear at first sight.