A pragmatist defense of non-relativistic explanatory pluralism in history and social science

History and Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 168-182

  Van Bouwel, Jeroen ^a   Weber, Erik ^a  

^a GHENT UNIVERSITY   (Belgium)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 57149146733     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00445.x     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. Tor Egil Førland, "The Ideal Explanatory Text in History: A Plea for Ecumenism," History and Theory 43 (2004), 323.
2. See chapter 5 of his The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
3. For more on the erotetic model, see, for example, Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation: Rethinking the Questions in Social Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981);
4. Harold Kincaid, Individualism and the Unity of Science (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997);
5. and Mark Risjord, Woodcutters and Witchcraft: Rationality and Interpretive Change in the Social Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).
6. In earlier articles we illustrated how different questions lead to the use of different forms of explanations: Erik Weber and Jeroen Van Bouwel, "Can We Dispense with the Structural Explanation of Social Facts?" Economics and Philosophy 18 (2002), 259-275;
7. Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber, "Remote Causes, Bad Explanations?" Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 32 (2002), 437-449.
8. P and P' are supposed to be mutually exclusive.
9. Van Fraassen, The Scientific Image, 131.
10. For a more extensive discussion (including real examples relating to the political history of Latin American countries), see Van Bouwel and Weber, "Remote Causes, Bad Explanations?"
11. This example is elaborated by Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984)
12. and discussed in Daniel Little, Varieties of Social Explanation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 58.
13. Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, "In Defense of Explanatory Ecumenism," Economics and Philosophy 8 (1992), 16.
14. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), viii.
15. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
16. Jon Elster, "Functional Explanation in Social Science," in Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science, ed. Michael Martin and Lee McIntyre (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 406.
17. Michael Taylor, "Rationality and Revolutionary Collective Action," in Rationality and Revolution, ed. Michael Taylor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 63-97.
18. where he refers to Jon Elster's Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 24, 28-29.
19. Taylor, "Rationality and Revolutionary Collective Action," 68.