The idea of social causation is a difficult one, as we dig more deeply into it. What does it mean to say that "poor education causes increased risk of delinquency" or "population growth causes technology change" or "the existence of paramilitary organizations contributed to the rise of German fascism"? What sorts of things can function …
Causal inference and random trials
image: Tamil Nadu nutrition study Nancy Cartwright has spent much of her career probing the assumptions scientists make about causation. She has helped to demonstrate that the Humean assumptions about causation that philosophers (including Carl Hempel) carried into twentieth century philosophy of science don't come close to answering the question correctly, and she has provided …
Problems with causal mechanisms
There are a couple of problems with the theory of causal mechanisms that will be difficult to address. Jim Mahoney raises a general concern in "Beyond Correlational Analysis" -- there is no consensus about how to define a mechanism. But there are more specific problems as well. One is the issue raised by Johannes Persson …
Macro causes of European fascism
Michael Mann's book Fascists makes use of causal claims at a range of levels, from the macro to the micro, to explain the emergence of European fascism. Here is a passage that highlights four macro-level causes of fascism: The interwar period in Europe was the setting that threw up most of the self-avowed fascists and saw them …
Are mechanisms complex?
Source: D. Little, "Causal explanation in the social sciences" (link) A causal mechanism is (i) a particular configuration of conditions and processes that (ii) always or normally leads from one set of conditions to an outcome (iii) through the properties and powers of the events and entities in the domain of concern. This captures the …
Causal mechanisms and scientific realism
From Social Epistemology ... (Editor’s Note: Johannes Persson’s article “Mechanistic Explanation in Social Contexts”, to which Daniel Little replies, appears in Social Epistemology 26.1 available through Taylor & Francis Online.) The social mechanisms approach to explanation (SM) has filled a very important gap in the theory of social explanation in the past twenty years, between …
Neil Gross on mechanisms
Neil Gross offers a friendly amendment to the growing literature on social mechanisms within sociology in "A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms" (link). He offers general support for the framework, but criticizes the main efforts at specifying what a social mechanism is. (James Mahoney makes a major effort to capture the main formulations in "Beyond Correlational …
Causal-mechanisms theory in Europe
The causal-mechanisms theory of social explanation has been influential throughout an extensive network of European philosophers and social scientists, often with a pretty direct connection to the analytical sociology research programme. Peter Hedstrom and his research network are particularly influential in this spread of ideas. It is worth mentioning a couple of books in the …
Woodward on mechanisms
Jim Woodward has extended a lot of his philosophical effort towards the task of understanding causation in the sciences (Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation). Woodward is a primary exponent of the "manipulationist" theory of causation. He brings a counterfactual orientation to the problem of defining causal relations. If we assert that X …
More on meso causation
A recent post considered the question, do organizations have causal powers? There I argued that they do, in a number of ways. Here I'd like to return to these claims and see how they disaggregate onto subvening circumstances, including especially patterns of individual and group activity. The italicized phrases are extracted from the earlier post. First, the …
Understanding Society 