Abstract
In a recent paper on realism and pragmatism published in this journal, Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen have been pleading for more methodological work in the philosophy of the social sciences—refining the conceptual tools of social scientists—and less philosophically ontological theories. Following this de-ontologizing approach, we scrutinize the debates on social explanation and contribute to the development of a pragmatic social science methodology. Analyzing four classic debates concerning explanation in the social sciences, we propose to shift the debate away from (a) the ontologizing defenses of forms of social explanation, and (b) a winner-takes-all-approach. Instead, we advocate (c) a pragmatic approach towards social explanation, elaborating a rigorous framework for explanatory pluralism detached from the debates on social ontology.
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Notes
P and P′ are supposed to be mutually exclusive.
Two kinds of fine-grain preference can be distinguished: the small-grain preference and close-grain preference. We will discuss the small-grain preference in this section; in the social sciences, the small-grain preference advises to look for detailed individualistic micro-accounts that replace macro-level accounts. The close-grain preference is a matter of favoring explanations that provide the detailed mediating mechanisms in causal chains across time. Explanations satisfying this preference will not leave any causal gaps in the temporal chain of events. So any explanatory factor that is at a temporal remove from the fact explained should be replaced by a factor closer to the fact. We will deal with the close-grain preference in section A third debate: remote versus proximate causes in structural explanations.
Lacking a better term; possible alternatives might be non-ontologizing strategy (in order to emphasise the distinction with the ontologizing strategy, but it might suggest that no ontological claims at all are made in this strategy, which is, of course, incorrect) or pragmatic strategy (as the core of the strategy is avoiding a kind of eternal truths or a priori ontological stances).
Cf., Kincaid (1997, p. 4): “Both individualists and holists often claim that their position is some kind of conceptual truth—that more or less a priori, perfectly general considerations show the other side inevitably flawed. I will argue that this approach is misguided. The real issues are ultimately empirical ones about how the world works.” And, Kivinen and Piiroinen (2006, p. 324): “Unlike those who believe that philosophical revelations of reality are the proper basis of scientific research practices, we prefer to approach social sciences from just about the opposite direction—from the direction of problem-driven methodology, instead of metaphysical theorizing.”
Cf. Sober (1999, p. 554): “The multiple realizability argument is not needed to show that the thesis of reducibility in practice is false; one can simply inspect present-day science to see this.”
Taylor refers to Jon Elster’s Explaining technical change (1983, pp. 24, 28–29).
We have elaborated the distinction between both forms of explanations here to show how both have their benefits. We do not want to exclude the possibility of explanations that combine both levels. These latter ones could provide the most adequate answer to some explanation-seeking why-question, as well.
According to Elster: “The attraction stems, I believe, from the implicit assumption that all social and psychological phenomena must have a meaning, i.e., that there must be some sense, some perspective in which they are beneficial for someone or something; and that furthermore these beneficial effects are what explain the phenomena in question.” (Elster 1994, p. 403).
This point is developed by Philip Pettit (1996). Virtual selection can be understood as follows: were the trait in question to be in danger of disappearing then a selectional mechanism would be activated that would preserve it against that danger (In general: the selectional mechanism may not operate under actual circumstances but would operate under relevant counterfactual conditions).
For a more extensive discussion (including real examples relating to the political history of South-American countries), see Van Bouwel and Weber (2002).
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Acknowledgement
Jeroen Van Bouwel is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Scientific Research Foundation, Flanders (Belgium). The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Van Bouwel, J., Weber, E. De-Ontologizing the Debate on Social Explanations: A Pragmatic Approach Based on Epistemic Interests. Hum Stud 31, 423–442 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-008-9102-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-008-9102-0