- Helsinki, Southern Finland, Finland
Petri Ylikoski
University of Helsinki, Department of Social Research, Faculty Member
- Linköping University, The Institute for Analytical Sociology, Faculty Memberadd
- Metodology of social research, Philosophy, Sociology, Social Studies Of Science, Explanation, Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge, and 29 morePhilosophy of Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Analytical Sociology, Causal Mechanisms: In Social Theory, Evidence, Philosophy of Science, Cognitive Science, Human Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Philosophy of Social Science, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy Of Economics, Cultural Evolution, Scientific Realism, Individualism, Science Studies, Rational Choice Theory, Reductionism, Scientific explanation, Mechanistic Explanation, Agent Based Simulation, Sociology of Science, Sociological Theory, Causation, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Science and Technology Studies, Computer Networks, Databases, and Softwareedit
This paper discusses Stephen Turner’s recent critique of theories of social practices. It shows that his arguments are valid against common explanatory uses of these concepts, but not against practices in general. There are plenty of... more
This paper discusses Stephen Turner’s recent critique of theories of social practices. It shows that his arguments are valid against common explanatory uses of these concepts, but not against practices in general. There are plenty of legitimate non-explanatory uses for practice concepts. The paper also suggests that Turner’s main arguments derive from two principles that have much wider application than practice theories. Consequently, they should be considered as general constraints on every social theory.
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Social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanation have attracted considerable attention in the social sciences and the philosophy of science during the past two decades. The idea of mechanistic explanation has proved to be a useful tool... more
Social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanation have attracted considerable attention in the social sciences and the philosophy of science during the past two decades. The idea of mechanistic explanation has proved to be a useful tool for criticizing existing research practices and meta-theoretical views on the nature of the social-scientific enterprise. Many definitions of social mechanisms have been articulated, and have been used to support a wide variety of methodological and theoretical claims. It is impossible to cover all of these in one chapter, so I will merely highlight some of the most prominent and philosophically interesting ideas.
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The Coleman diagram is one of the most famous theoretical diagrams in sociology. The aim of this article is to provide a rational reconstruction of the diagram as a tool for social scientific theorizing. I will show how Coleman uses the... more
The Coleman diagram is one of the most famous theoretical diagrams in sociology. The aim of this article is to provide a rational reconstruction of the diagram as a tool for social scientific theorizing. I will show how Coleman uses the diagram and how it can be employed as a tool for theoretical thinking. I will also demonstrate how it can be used to clarify the nature of the micro-macro challenge in social explanation. The structure of the article is as following. Section 2 will describe the diagram and its elements. Section 3 will show various ways in which Coleman used the diagram in his work. Section 4 discusses more systematically issues related to the interpretation of the diagram, and Section 5 will provide a diagnosis of some recent interpretations of the diagram. Finally, Section 6 focuses on some important limitations of the diagram.
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Ideas about social scientific explanation lie at the core of debates about methodological individualism (MI). The spirit of MI is captured by definition by Jon Elster: " … all social phenomena – their structure and their change – are in... more
Ideas about social scientific explanation lie at the core of debates about methodological individualism (MI). The spirit of MI is captured by definition by Jon Elster: " … all social phenomena – their structure and their change – are in principle explicable in ways that only involve individuals – their properties, their goals, their beliefs and their actions " (Elster 1985: 5). For many individualists, like Elster, the basic idea of MI, when properly understood, is obvious and almost trivial. However, in equal measure, for many opponents the doctrine is an obviously wrong and unnecessary limitation for social scientific theorizing. The main task of this chapter is to explain how this state of affairs is possible. Much hangs on how MI is formulated, it might be that David Ruben is still right: " … methodological individualism has never been stated with enough clarity and precision to permit proper evaluation " (Ruben 1985: 13). However, there is much more at stake than abstract issues about social explanation.
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This paper provides an inferentialist account of model-based understanding by combining a counterfactual account of explanation and an inferentialist account of representation with a view of modeling as extended cognition. This account... more
This paper provides an inferentialist account of model-based understanding by combining a counterfactual account of explanation and an inferentialist account of representation with a view of modeling as extended cognition. This account makes it understandable how the manipulation of surrogate systems like models can provide genuinely new empirical understanding about the world. Similarly, the account provides an answer to the question how models, that always incorporate assumptions that are literally untrue of the model target, can still provide factive explanations. Finally, the paper showshow the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation can provide tools for assessing the explanatory power of models.
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This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their... more
This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their interrelations. These explanations have different kinds of explananda and they track different sorts of dependencies. Constitutive explanations do not address events or behaviors, but causal capacities. While there are some interesting relations between building and causal manipulation, causation and constitution are not to be confused. Constitution is a synchronous and asymmetric relation between relata that cannot be conceived as independent existences. However, despite their metaphysical differences, the same key ideas about explanation largely apply to both. Causal and constitutive explanations face similar challenges (such as the problems of relevance and explanatory regress) and both are in the business of mapping networks of counterfactual dependence – i.e. mechanisms – although the relevant counterfactuals are of a different sort. In the final section the issue of developmental explanation is discussed. It is argued that developmental explanations deserve their own place in taxonomy of explanations, although ultimately developmental dependencies can be analyzed as combinations of causal and constitutive dependencies. Hence, causal and constitutive explanation are distinct, but not always completely separate forms of explanation.
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This paper discusses the epistemic import of highly abstract and simplified theoretical models using Thomas Schelling’s checkerboard model as an example. We argue that the epistemic contribution of theoretical models can be better... more
This paper discusses the epistemic import of highly abstract and simplified theoretical models using Thomas Schelling’s checkerboard model as an example. We argue that the epistemic contribution of theoretical models can be better understood in the context of a cluster of models relevant to the explanatory task at hand. The central claim of the paper is that theoretical models make better sense in the context of the menu of possible explanations. In order to justify this claim, we introduce a distinction between causal scenarios and causal mechanism schemes. These conceptual tools help us to articulate the basis for modelers’ intuitive confidence that their models make an important epistemic contribution. For example, by focusing on the role of the menu of possible explanations in the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, it is possible to understand how a causal mechanism scheme can improve our explanatory understanding even in cases where it does not describe the actual cause of a particular phenomenon.
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The psychiatric category of addiction has recently been broadened to include new behaviors. This has prompted critical discussion about the value of a concept that covers so many different substances and activities. Many of the debates... more
The psychiatric category of addiction has recently been broadened to include new behaviors. This has prompted critical discussion about the value of a concept that covers so many different substances and activities. Many of the debates surrounding the notion of addiction stem from different views concerning what kind of a thing addiction fundamentally is. In this essay, we put forward an account that conceptualizes different addictions as sharing a cluster of relevant properties (the syndrome) that is supported by a matrix of causal mechanisms. According to this “addiction-as-a-kind” hypothesis, several different kinds of substance and behavioral addictions can be thought of as instantiations of the same thing – addiction. We show how a clearly articulated account of addiction can facilitate empirical research and the theoretical integration of different perspectives on addiction. The causal matrix approach provides a promising alternative to existing accounts of the nature of psychiatric disorders, the traditional disease model, and its competitors. It is a positive addition to discussions about diagnostic criteria, and sheds light on how psychiatric classification may be integrated with research done in other scientific fields. We argue that it also provides a plausible approach to understanding comorbidity, and suggests how knowledge concerning specific forms of addiction could be useful in designing research as well as treatment interventions for other forms of addiction.
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Constitutive mechanistic explanations explain a property of a whole with the properties of its parts and their organization. Carl Craver’s mutual manipulability criterion for constitutive relevance only captures the explanatory relevance... more
Constitutive mechanistic explanations explain a property of a whole with the properties of its parts and their organization. Carl Craver’s mutual manipulability criterion for constitutive relevance only captures the explanatory relevance of causal properties of parts and leaves the organization side of mechanistic explanation unaccounted for. We use the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation and an account of the dimensions of organization to build a typology of organizational dependence. We analyse organizational explanations in terms of such dependencies and emphasize the importance of modular organizational motifs. We apply this framework to two cases from social science and systems biology, both fields in which organization plays a crucial explanatory role: agent-based simulations of residential segregation and the recent work on network motifs in transcription regulation networks.
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The article discusses agent-based simulation as a tool of sociological understanding. Based on an inferential account of understanding, it argues that computer simulations increase our explanatory understanding both by expanding our... more
The article discusses agent-based simulation as a tool of sociological understanding. Based on an inferential account of understanding, it argues that computer simulations increase our explanatory understanding both by expanding our ability to make what-if inferences about social processes and by making these inferences more reliable. However, our ability to understand simulations limits our ability to understand real world phenomena through them. Thomas Schelling’s checkerboard model of ethnic segregation is used to demonstrate the important role played by abstract how-possibly models in the process of building a mechanistic understanding of social phenomena.
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Social scientists associate agent-based simulation (ABS) models with three ideas about explanation: they provide generative explanations, they are models of mechanisms, and they implement methodological individualism. In light of a... more
Social scientists associate agent-based simulation (ABS) models with three ideas about explanation: they provide generative explanations, they are models of mechanisms, and they implement methodological individualism. In light of a philosophical account of explanation, we show that these ideas are not necessarily related and offer an account of the explanatory import of ABS models. We also argue that their bottom-up research strategy should be distinguished from methodological individualism.
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During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important... more
During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism- based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The second part focuses on how the idea of mechanisms has been used in the social sciences. The final part discusses recent developments in analytical sociology, covering the nature of sociological explananda, the role of theory of action in mechanism-based explanations, Merton’s idea of middle-range theory, and the role of agent-based simulations in the development of mechanism-based explanations.
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Many of the arguments for neuroeconomics rely on mistaken assumptions about criteria of explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries and fail to distinguish between evidential and explanatory relevance. Building on recent... more
Many of the arguments for neuroeconomics rely on mistaken assumptions about criteria of explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries and fail to distinguish between evidential and explanatory relevance. Building on recent philosophical work on mechanistic research programmes and the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation, we argue that explaining an explanatory presupposition or providing a lower-level explanation does not necessarily constitute explanatory improvement. Neuroscientific findings have explanatory relevance only when they inform a causal and explanatory account of the psychology of human decision-making.
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Kommentointia Psykologia-lehden edellisessä numerossa 3/09 käytyyn keskusteluun aiheesta "Mikä tekee psykologiasta psykologian?".