Abstract
In a series of insightful publications, Philip Pettit and Frank Jackson have argued for an explanatory ecumenism that is designed to justify a variety of types of social scientific explanation of different “grains”, including structural and rational choice explanations. Their arguments are put in terms of different kinds of explanatory information; the distinction between causal efficacy, causal relevance and explanatory relevance within their program model of explanation; and virtual reality and resilience explanation. The arguments are here assessed from the point of view of the illumination they are able to cast on the issue of economics imperialism, the project of privileging rational choice as a unifying basis for explanations. While the Jackson–Pettit arguments turn out to be helpful in specifying some of the ontological and pragmatic constraints on economics imperialism, they are also shown to conflate distinct dimensions in the purported explanantia (such as small grain and particular grain, and the macro and the existentially quantified) and thereby to miss an important class of individualist causal process explanations of social phenomena.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Economics and Econometrics,Philosophy
Cited by
21 articles.
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1. The Structure of Complexity and the Limits of Collective Intentionality;Philosophy of the Social Sciences;2022-02-15
2. A unificationist defence of revealed preferences;Economics and Philosophy;2019-02-22
3. Interdisciplinarity and expert knowledge: A case of “law and economics”;Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filosofiya, sotsiologiya, politologiya;2018-12-01
4. Hypothetical Models in Social Science;Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science;2017
5. Economics Imperialism in Social Epistemology;Philosophy of the Social Sciences;2016-08-02