Affiliation:
1. Department of Cultural Studies and Languages, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway.
Abstract
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 macro-explanations 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.
Cited by
3 articles.
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