 Within philosophy and the social sciences, whether in the context of the dispensability or the microfoundations debate, proponents of methodological holism do not necessarily describe their position in such terms. In fact, this is seldom so within the social sciences. In certain cases, some alternative label is used, for example, when “explanatory holism” and “collectivism” are employed to denote the view that holist explanations are indispensable. In other cases, no label at all is attributed to one or both of the views that are here described as methodologically holist. In this entry, differences of terminology will be disregarded: the term “methodological holism” is used to describe both the thesis that holist explanations are indispensable, as well as the thesis that purely holist explanations do not always need individual-level microfoundations.