Causation in the social sciences: Evidence, inference, and purpose

Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 20-40

  Reiss, Julian ^a  

^a ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

Causation; Evidence; Methodology; Pluralism

Indexed keywords

EID: 59949098062     PISSN: 00483931     EISSN: 15527441     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0048393108328150     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Bacon, Francis. 1605/ 2001. The advancement of learning. Philadelphia: Paul Dry.
2. Campaner, Raffaella, and Maria Carla Galavotti. 2007. Plurality in causality. In Thinking about causes: From Greek philosophy to modern physics, edited by Peter Machamer and Gereon Wolters, 178-99. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
3. Card, Richard. 2006. Card, Cross and Jones. Criminal law, 1 7 th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. The dappled world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5. - -. 2002. In favor of laws that are not ceteris paribus after all. Erkenntnis 57: 425-39.
6. - -. 2007. Hunting causes and using them. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7. Cook, Thomas, and Donald Campbell. 1979. Quasi-experimentation: Design and analysis issues for field settings. Chicago: Rand McNally College Publication s.
8. Cowley, Robert. 1999. What if? The world's most foremost military historians imagine what might have been. New York: Berkeley Books.
9. De Vreese, Leen. 2006. Causal pluralism and scientific knowledge: An underexposed problem. Philosophica 77 (1). 125-50.
10. Elster, Jon. 2007. Explaining social behavior: More nuts and bolts for the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. Engle, Robert, David Hendry, and Jean-Franois Richard. 1983. Exogeneity. Econometrica 51 (2). 277-304.
12. Fogel, Robert. 1964. Railroads and American economic growth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
13. Freedman, David. 1997. From association to causation via regression. Advances in Applied Mathematics 18: 59-110.
14. Gasking, Douglas. 1955. Causation and recipes. Mind 64: 479-87.
15. Gerring, John. 2005. Causation: A unified framework for the social sciences. Journal of Theoretical Politics 17 (2). 168-98.
16. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Forthcoming. Causal pluralism. In Oxford handbook of causation, edited by Helen Beebee, Peter Menzies, and Christopher Hitchcock. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
17. Goertz, Gary, and Jack Levy. 2007. Causal explanation, necessary conditions, and case studies. In Explaining war and peace: Case studies and necessary condition counterfactuals, 9-46. London: Routledge.
18. Greene. 2000. Econometric analysis. 4 th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
19. Hall, Ned. 2004. Two concepts of causation. In Causation and counterfactuals, edited by John Collins, Ned Hall, and Laurie Paul, 225-76. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20. Hart, H.L.A., and Tony Honor©. 1985. Causation in the law. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.
21. Hedstr¶m, Peter, and Richard Swedberg, eds. 1999. Social mechanisms: An analytical approach to social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
22. Hitchcock, Christopher. 2003. Of human bondage. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (1). 1-25.
23. - -. 2007. How to be a causal pluralist. In Thinking about causes: From Greek philosophy to modern physics, edited by Peter Machamer and Gereon Wolters, 200-221. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
24. Hoover, Kevin. 2001. Causality in macroeconomics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
25. Lange, Marc. 2000. Natural laws in scientific practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
26. Lewis, David. 1979. Counterfactual dependence and time's arrow. No»s 13 (4). 455-76.
27. Little, Daniel. 1991. Varieties of social explanation. Boulder, CO: Westview.
28. Lucas, Robert. 1976. Econometric policy evaluation: A critique. Carnegie-Rochester Series on Public Policy 1: 19-46.
29. Mackie, John. 1974. The cement of the universe: A study of causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
30. McBride, Nicholas, and Roderick Bagshaw. 2005. Tort law. 2 nd ed. Harlow, UK: Longman.
31. Northcott, Robert. 2008. Weighted explanations in history. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38 (1). 76-96.
32. Pindyck, Robert, and Daniel Rubinfeld. 1991. Econometric models and economic forecasts. New York: McGraw-Hill.
33. Psillos, Stathis. Forthcoming. Causal pluralism. Athens, Greece: University of Athens Press.
34. Pundik, Amit. 2007. Can one deny both causation by omission and causal pluralism? The case of legal causation. In Causality and probability in the sciences, edited by Federica Russo and Jon Williamson, 379-412. London: College Publications.
35. Ragin, Charles. 1998. The logic of quality comparative analysis. International Review of Social History 43 (Suppl.): 105-24.
36. Reiss, Julian. 2007 a. Do we need mechanisms in the social sciences ? Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37 (2). 163-84.
37. - -. 2007 b. Time series, nonsense correlations and the principle of the common cause. In Causality and probability in the sciences, edited by Federica Russo and Jon Williamson, 179-96. London: College Publications.
38. - -. 2008. Error in economics: Towards a more evidence-based methodology. London: Routledge.
39. - -. Forthcoming. Counterfactuals, thought experiments and singular causal analysis in history. Philosophy of Science.
40. Reiss, Julian, and Nancy Cartwright. 2004. Uncertainty in econometrics: Evaluating policy counterfactuals. In Economic policy under uncertainty: The role of truth and accountability in policy advice, edited by Peter Mooslechner, Helene Schuberth, and Martin Sch1/4rz, 204-32. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
41. Russo, Federica. 2006. The rationale of variation in methodological and evidential pluralism. Philosophica 77 (1). 97-123.
42. Russo, Federica, and Jon Williamson. 2007. Interpreting causality in the health sciences. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21 (2). 157-70.
43. Sober, Elliott. 1987. The principle of the common cause. In Probability and causation: Essays in honor of Wesley Salmon, edited by James Fetzer, 211-228. Dordrecht: Reidel.
44. - -. 2001. Venetian sea levels, British bread prices, and the principle of the common cause. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52: 331-346.
45. Steel, Daniel. 2004. Social mechanisms and causal inference. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34 (1). 55-78.
46. Tetlock, Philip, and Aaron Belkin, eds. 1996. Counterfactual thought experiments in world politics: Logical, methodological and psychological perspectives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
47. Tetlock, Philip, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker. 2006. Unmaking the West: "What-if" scenarios that rewrite world history. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
48. Thagard, Paul. 1999. How scientists explain disease. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
49. Weber, Erik. 2007. Conceptual tools for causal analysis in the social sciences. In Causality and probability in the sciences, edited by Federica Russo and Jon Williamson. London: College Publications.
50. Weber, Max. 1905 / 1949. Objective possibility and adequate causation in historical explanation. In The methodology of the social sciences, edited by Max Weber, Edward Shils, and Henry Finch, 164-88. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
51. Williamson, Jon. 2005. Bayesian nets and causality: Philosophical and computational foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
52. - -. 2006 a. Causal pluralism versus epistemic causality. Philosophica 77 (1). 69-96.
53. - -. 2006 b. Dispositional versus epistemic causality. Minds and Machines 16: 259-76.
54. - -. 2007. Causality. In Handbook of philosophical logic, vol. 14, edited by Dov Gabbay and Franz Guenthner, 89-120. Berlin: Springer.
55. Woodward, James. 2003. Making things happen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.