Social Mechanisms and Explanatory Relevance

Mind & Society, 2005

This paper discusses various problems of explanations by mechanisms. Two positions are distinguished: the narrow position claims that only explanations by mechanisms are acceptable. It is argued that this position leads to an infinite regress because the discovery of a mechanism must entail the search for other mechanisms etc. Another paradoxical consequence of this postulate is that every successful explanation by mechanisms is unsatisfactory because it generates new ''black box'' explanations. The second-liberal-position that is advanced in this paper regards, besides explanations by mechanisms, also the discovery of bivariate correlations as a first step of an explanation by mechanisms as meaningful. It is further argued that there is no contradiction between causal analysis and the explanation by mechanisms. Instead, explanations by mechanisms always presuppose the analysis of causal structures (but not vice versa). The final point is that an explanation by mechanisms is not inconsistent with the Hempel-Oppenheim scheme of explanation.

2010

During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism- based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The second part focuses on how the idea of mechanisms has been used in the social sciences. The final part discusses recent developments in analytical sociology, covering the nature of sociological explananda, the role of theory of action in mechanism-based explanations, Merton’s idea of middle-range theory, and the role of agent-based simulations in the development of mechanism-based explanations.

Analyse & Kritik, 2016

The revival of action based explanations as well as their formal structuring have been two of the most important topics within explanatory sociology since the 1980s. The two newly developed approaches, being structural individualism and analytical sociology based on mechanism models, will be outlined in this article. The article is dedicated to a comparison of the aims and the formal structure of both approaches. It is shown that explanations within analytical sociology tend to be more realistic but also more complex. They do not differentiate between micro and macro levels in analytical terms and use micro mechanisms instead of an analytically strong action theory that makes it difficult to systemize mechanism models. On the other hand, structural individualistic explanations that use a general action law from which social interdependencies are to be interpreted as an opportunity structure can formulate a default-option from which models can be expanded and also worked out to mecha...

Sociological Bulletin, 2018

Mechanism-based explanations are widely discussed in contemporary social science. A virtue of mechanism-based explanations is that they can tell us how social and psychological factors are related to each other and in addition provide explanatory depth. I will argue against an argument which contends that to describe underlying mechanisms at the individual level do not contribute to improve macroexplanations at the social level. However, the critics of the mechanism approach are right that under certain conditions there can be successful explanations without mentioning underlying mechanisms. Although the mechanism approach is a reductive strategy, it does not entail that the social sciences will lose their descriptively and explanatory autonomy. The debate about reductionism and explanation often take place at an abstract philosophical level, but it is argued that to what extent the mechanism approach will influence the autonomy of the social sciences is an empirical problem and cannot be decided a priori.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 1990

Hempelian orthodoxy on the nature of explanation in general, and on explanation in the social sciences in particular, holds that(a) full explanations are arguments(b) full explanations must include at least one law(c) reason explanations are causalDavid Ruben disputes (a) and (b) but he does not dispute (c). Nor does he dispute that ‘explanations in both natural and social science need laws in other ways, even when not as part of the explanation itself (p. 97 above). The distance between his view and the covering law theory, he points out, ‘is not as great as it may first appear to be’ (p. 97 above).

Explanations implicitly end with something that makes sense, and begin with something that does not make sense. A statistical relationship, for example, a numerical fact, does not make sense; an explanation of this relationship adds something, such as causal information, which does make sense, and provides an endpoint for the sense-making process. Does social science differ from natural science in this respect? One difference is that in the natural sciences, models are what need “understanding.” In the social sciences, matters are more complex. There are models, such as causal models, which need to be understood, but also depend on background knowledge that goes beyond the model and the correlations that make it up, which produces a regress. The background knowledge is knowledge of in-filling mechanisms, which are normally made up of elements that involve the direct understanding of the acting and believing subjects themselves. These models, and social science explanations generally, are satisfactory only when they end the regress in this kind of understanding or use direct understanding evidence to decide between alternative mechanism explanations.

Social Epistemology, 2012

Jon Elster worries about the explanatory power of the social sciences. His main concern is that they have so few well-established laws. Elster develops an interesting substitute: a special kind of mechanism designed to fill the explanatory gap between laws and mere description. However, his mechanisms suffer from a characteristic problem that I will explore in this article. As our causal knowledge of a specific problem grows we might come to know too much to make use of an Elsterian mechanism but still lack a law. We might then find ourselves in the paradoxical position of knowing more relevant causal truths about the phenomenon we are interested in than we did before, but being able to explain less. If this possibility is realized in social science settings, as I argue it might well be, Elster's mechanistic account is threatened. Moreover, even if the possibility is rarely realized in that way, it raises, simply as a possibility, a conceptual problem with Elster's mechanistic framework.

A philosophically useful account of social structure must accommodate the fact that social structures play an important role in structural explanation. But what is a structural explanation? How do structural explanations function in the social sciences? This paper offers a way of thinking about structural explanation and sketches an account of social structure that connects social structures with structural explanation.

Noûs, 2023

Social scientists appeal to various "structures" in their explanations including public policies, economic systems, and social hierarchies. Significant debate surrounds the explanatory relevance of these factors for various outcomes such as health, behavioral, and economic patterns. This paper provides a causal account of social structural explanation that is motivated by Haslanger (2016). This account suggests that one way that social structure is explanatory is in virtue of operating as a causal constraint, which is a causal factor with unique characteristics. A novel causal framework is provided for understanding these explanations-this addresses puzzles regarding the mysterious causal influence of social structure, how to understand its relation to individual choice, and what makes it more explanatory (and causally responsible) for various outcomes.

Explanation of a Sudanese people's attributing untoward events to witchcraft but otherwise relying on "empirical knowledge of cause and effect."