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Mechanistic explanation in social contexts: Elster and the problem of local scientific growth

In English

Författare

Summary, in English

Jon Elster worries about the explanatory power of the social sciences. His main concern is

that they have so few well-established laws. Elster (2007) 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 which 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.

Publiceringsår

2012

Språk

Engelska

Sidor

105-114

Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie

Social Epistemology

Volym

26

Issue

1

Dokumenttyp

Artikel i tidskrift

Förlag

Routledge

Ämne

  • Nursing
  • Philosophy

Nyckelord

  • scientific growth
  • mechanism
  • explanation
  • Elster

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt

  • ISSN: 0269-1728