Abstract
Recently, sociologists have expended much effort in attempts to define social mechanisms. We intervene in these debates by proposing that sociologists in fact have a choice to make between three standards of what constitutes a good mechanistic explanation: substantial, formal, and metaphorical mechanistic explanation. All three standards are active in the field, and we suggest that a more complete theory of mechanistic explanation in sociology must parse these three approaches to draw out the implicit evaluative criteria appropriate to each. Doing so will reveal quite different preferences for explanatory scope and nuance hidden under the ubiquitous term ‘social mechanism.’ Finally, moving beyond extensive debates about realism and anti-realism, we argue prescriptively against ‘mechanistic fundamentalism’ for sociology, and advocate for a more pluralistic understanding of social causality.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the term “substantial” because this standard includes mechanisms that posit causal capacities inherent to particular substances or entities.
- 2.
We have selected Cartwright’s theory of mechanisms because it is the most comprehensive, synthesizing prominent structuralist, process, and interventionist positions on mechanistic causation, represented separately by philosophers like Bechtel and Richardson (1993), Machamer et al. (2000), and Menzies (2012), into a coherent ontological position with clear epistemological implications for causal explanation.
- 3.
Cartwright herself tests the uncertain construct of social capacities by analyzing economic models, such as game-theoretic simulations. She finds that, to the extent these models meet the substantial standard, they do so by sacrificing external validity (1999: 149). Ultimately, Cartwright finds that social capacities are extremely difficult to pin down, in part because they are constituted and reconstituted by human agents reacting to historical circumstances, individual impulses, and any number of other irregular or impermanent factors (cf. Crespo 2013).
- 4.
While Cartwright by no means dismisses sociologists’ ability to construct causal explanations, she is generically skeptical about social scientists’ ability to convincingly construct mechanisms that reveal real social capacities. This is due in part to a lack of plausible general principles from which social scientists can work to isolate the tendencies of social capacities by eliminating extraneous forces and bracketing structural assumptions built into their models (Cartwright 2009: 50).
- 5.
- 6.
Though initially a strong proponent of a purely analytical approach to social mechanisms, Hedström’s subsequent research around the desires-beliefs-opportunities (DBO) model can be interpreted as presuming a substantialist basis for the DBOs it postulates. Hedström’s ontological drift highlights how the potential for slippage between substantial and formal approaches bedevils many efforts to define a single standard for mechanistic explanation, a problem that further justifies the need to self-consciously parse the different explanatory standards of each approach.
- 7.
An early forerunner was Stephen Pepper (1961), who considered mechanism to be a prime example of a “root metaphor,” the basic framework that generates comprehensive “world hypotheses”—grand and all-encompassing schemes that guide cognition in science and philosophy. For Pepper, metaphor pre-sorts the kinds of processes that can be imagined as ontological furniture of the world in the first place.
- 8.
This talk was delivered at New York University, December 9, 2013.
- 9.
In the same text wherein she developed her understanding of nomological machines, Cartwright developed her criticism of standard philosophy of science in a new direction. “It is not realism,” she wrote, “but fundamentalism that we need to combat” (Cartwright 1999: 23, emphasis in original). Fundamentalism holds that the things described in laws or models are not only true, but true everywhere. In application, the fundamentalist position posits that every observable instance of any given phenomenon can ultimately be reduced to one of a few basic laws. For Cartwright, the problematic fundamentalism which drives to reduce the world to the laws of physics has as its preferable counterpoint her notion of the “dappled world.” The dappled world is one where those purportedly universal, fundamental laws of physics describe only a limited range of phenomena and only under certain conditions; the rest of the world as we know it is populated by various “natures” which we know to tend toward certain activities but cannot hope to predict in the same way we can those few nomological machines that are described in natural law. Those situations not governed by universal laws can be subsumed under these laws “only by distortion, whereas they can often be described fairly correctly by concepts from more phenomenological laws” (1999: 31). Where natures can be described more accurately in phenomenological terms, they should “be admitted into the body of knowledge on their own merit” (1999: 24). It is important for understanding our argument that Cartwright’s notion of “natures” or “capacities” that make up nomological machines is part of her dappled world hypothesis—in other words, the world of causality has to be understood as dappled because different things in the world have different natures. This is why Cartwright calls her position one of “metaphysical nomological pluralism”—it does not abandon general causes and assumes that our descriptions of causes can get very close to describing the real world. However, it assumes that there are many species of cause, and that the task of the (physical, natural, and social) sciences is to catalog the great variety of causes in ways that help us explain our world.
Our argument is that a metaphorical understanding of mechanisms aids in doubling down on this “dappled world” hypothesis. In the human sciences, the construal of the world is such that even within the set of causes that concern “sociology,” the world is extraordinarily dappled, because objects, kinds, and processes are formed and then unformed in a world of cultural and historical variation of ontology (see Chap. 3). In this context, there is a parallel to the fundamentalism in the philosophy of science that attempts to reduce all causal natures to the laws of physics.
- 10.
This argument is based on our own affinity for the metaphorical standard. However, a more pluralistic approach to mechanisms is possible for sociologists who are not inclined toward the metaphorical standard and do not wish to extend the group of causal metaphors beyond mechanism. Particularly from within the formal standard, one could posit “sundry mechanisms of different kinds.” We thank anonymous reviewer 1 of the chapter for pointing this out.
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Aviles, N.B., Ariail Reed, I. (2023). Ratio via Machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology. In: Sociology as a Human Science . Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_5
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