Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T15:23:47.565Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mechanisms and Functional Hypotheses in Social Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Daniel Steel
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Critics of functional explanations in social science maintain that such explanations are illegitimate unless a mechanism is specified. Others argue that mechanisms are not necessary for causal inference and that functional explanations are a type of causal claim that raise no special difficulties for testing. I show that there is indeed a special problem that confronts testing functional explanations resulting from their connection to second-order causal claims. I explain how mechanisms can resolve this difficulty, but argue that this does not provide support for methodological individualism since it is not necessary that the mechanisms be described in terms of individual interactions.

Type
Philosophy of Social Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 72 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2005 , pp. 941 - 952
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cohen, G. A. (1978), Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Cummins, Robert (1975), “Functional Analysis”, Functional Analysis 72:741–764.Google Scholar
Eells, Ellery (1991), Probabilistic Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elster, Jon (1983), Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Elster, Jon (1989), Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hannan, Michael, and Freeman, John (1989), Organizational Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hempel, Carl (1965), Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Christopher (1996), “A Probabilistic Theory of Second-Order Causation”, A Probabilistic Theory of Second-Order Causation 44:369–377.Google Scholar
Kincaid, Harold (1990), “Assessing Functional Explanations in the Social Sciences”, in Fine, A., Forbes, M., and Wessels, L. (eds.), PSA 1990: Proceedings of the 1990 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol. 1. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 341–354.Google Scholar
Kincaid, Harold (1996), Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Little, Daniel (1991), Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science. Boulder, CO: Westview.Google Scholar
Little, Daniel (1998), Microfoundations, Method, and Causation: On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Pearl, Judea (2000), Causality: Models, Reason, and Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Spirtes, Peter, Glymour, Clark, and Scheines, Richard (2000), Causation, Prediction, and Search. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Steel, Daniel (2004), “Social Mechanisms and Causal Inference”, Social Mechanisms and Causal Inference 34:55–78.Google Scholar
Suppes, Patrick (1970), A Probabilistic Theory of Causality. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar
Wright, Larry (1976), Teleological Explanations: An Etiological Analysis of Goals and Functions. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar