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mechanisms resonates with the scientific realist school of thought in the philosophy of science. We are wary of using the term “scientific realism” too readily because there are almost as many versions of scientific realism as there are philosophers calling themselves realists. Fred Chernoff, for example, identifies six different versions of scientific realism; “Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory of International Politics,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2 (June 2002), p. 191. For our purposes, we do not need to analyze the many variants of scientific realism; we merely note for interested readers the connection between some of our arguments and a few of the propositions common among scientific realists.

One of the most widely used definitions of scientific realism, for example, is Richard Boyd’s view that the terms of science refer to ontological entities that exist independently of the observer and that the laws or theories in mature sciences are approximately true. Richard Boyd, “Realism, Underdetermination and a Causal Theory of Evidence,” Nous, Vol. 7 (1973), pp. 1-12. With regard to the social world, the argument that “social facts” or entities exist independently of the observer, while not universally accepted, is one that we endorse as a working proposition. The assertion that theories in some sciences are approximately true is more widely contested, and we see no need to take either side of this proposition for qualitative research to be fruitful. Our views have less in common with Boyd’s version of scientific realism than with what Daniel Little has proposed as a “doctrine of causal realism for the social sciences.” Little argues that causal explanation should be the goal of social science, and that causal mechanisms play a key role in causal explanation. See Daniel Little, Microfoundations, Methods, and Causation: On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998), pp. 197-198.

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Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 15.

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James Mahoney, “Beyond Correlational Analysis: Recent Innovations in Theory and Method,” Sociological Forum, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2001), pp. 575-593. For similar views, see George Steinmetz, “Critical Realism and Historical Sociology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 40, No. 1 (January 1998), pp. 177-178. For other scientific realist views on causal mechanisms, see Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism; and Rom Harre, The Principles of Scientific Thinking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

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Salmon, “Scientific Explanation,” p. 71. Salmon adds that “I have argued that causal processes are precisely the kinds of causal connections that Hume sought but was unable to find” (p. 71).

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Of course, the ability to isolate a causal mechanism from the operation of all other mechanisms, which would be the equivalent of a perfect experiment or a testable counterfactual proposition, is not attainable in practice. Experimental methods attempt to approximate such a perfect experiment, while observational methods, including most statistical as well as qualitative work in the social sciences, try to control for or rule out the effects of mechanisms other than the mechanisms being investigated.

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Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, University Press, 1994), p. 86. This volume does give one example—drawn from research on whether a mass extinction of dinosaurs was caused by a large meteor hitting the earth (pp. 11-12)—that fits our approach of using process-tracing to construct historical explanations that provide evidence on theories. All the other examples in the book, however, focus on cross-case inferences on causal effects. Elsewhere, Robert Keohane has discussed causal explanation in ways that are quite similar to our own emphasis on causal mechanisms. See his “International Relations: