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and Oppenheim never resolved this issue and that Hempel even argued later that causality does not play a crucial role in scientific explanation, a stance that Salmon and others found unsatisfactory. We do not offer an explanation of laws themselves but rather, like Salmon, note that they invoke causal mechanisms that are ultimately unobservable.

259

On this and other counterexamples to the D-N model, see Salmon, Four Decades, pp. 46-47.

260

Salmon, Four Decades, p. 120. Salmon develops this argument from the work of Peter Railton, “Explaining Explanation: A Realist Account of Scientific Explanation and Understanding” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., 1980).

261

On the technical problems attending attempts at probabilistic explanation, see Salmon, Four Decades, pp. 61-89.

262

Salmon, Four Decades, p. 166; our emphasis. Salmon adds that he found “severe difficulties” with probabilistic accounts of causality, reinforcing his view that “causal concepts cannot be fully explicated in terms of statistical relationships; in addition, I concluded, we need to appeal to causal processes and causal interactions” (p. 168).

263

Salmon, “Scientific Explanation,” p. 69. Salmon attributes the emergence of this approach to explanation to the works of Michael Scriven, citing, among other works, Scriven’s “Explanations, Predictions, and Laws,” in Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell, eds., Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time, Vol. 3, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), pp. 170-230.

264

Salmon, Four Decades, pp. 182-183. Salmon contrasts this with the “unification approach” to explanation, which “holds that scientific understanding increases as we decrease the number of independent assumptions that are required to explain what goes on in the world. It seeks laws and principles of the utmost generality and depth.” Salmon, Four Decades, p. 182. See also Salmon, “Scientific Explanation,” pp. 68-78. Salmon suggests that the two conceptions of explanation are not incompatible, and he gives examples of phenomena that can be explained through either approach. We focus here on mechanism-based explanations without ruling out that some mechanisms may be of such a general character that they can provide unification-type explanations of diverse phenomena.

265

See David Dessler, “Beyond Correlations: Toward a Causal Theory of War,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (September 1991), pp. 337-355; Jon Elster, Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (London: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jon Elster, Political Psychology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Daniel Little, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991); Margaret Mooney Marini and Burton Singer, “Causality in the Social Sciences,” in Clifford Clogg, ed., Sociological Methodology, Vol. 18 (1988), pp. 347-409; Richard W. Miller, Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and Social Sciences (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); Salmon, Four Decades; Andrew Sayer, Method in the Social Sciences: A Realist Approach, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1992); Charles Tilly, “Means and Ends of Comparison in Macrosociology,” Comparative Social Research, Vol. 16 (1997), pp. 43-53; Arthur Stinchcombe, “The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing About Mechanisms in Social Science,” in Aage B. Sorensen and Seymour Spilerman, eds., Social Theory and Social Policy: Essays in Honor of James S. Coleman (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993), pp. 23-41; and Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedborg, “Social Mechanisms,” Acta Sociologica, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1996), pp. 255-342.

266

Peter Hedstrom and Richard Swedburg, Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 13.

267

Our above discussion of causal