Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences - Alexander L. George [202]
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Albert S. Yee, “The Causal Effect of Ideas on Policies,” International Organization, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Winter 1996), p. 84.
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Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in Daniel Hausman, ed., The Philosophy of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 218.
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“As if” assumptions of the type Friedman deploys have been common among rational choice theorists, but notably, rational choice theorists have increasingly eschewed blanket “as if” assumptions and argued that their theories and the causal mechanism they posit should be evident in the decision-making processes and behavior of individuals. Prominent rational choice theorists Robert H. Bates, Barry R. Weingast, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, for example, present an approach to combining and integrating rational choice theories with case narratives that to some degree examines the ways in which decisions were actually made. See these authors’ book, Analytic Narratives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
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John Goldthorpe similarly argues that the idea of causation advanced by statisticians assumes that a statistical association “is created by some ‘mechanism’ opening ‘at a more microscopic level’ than at which the association is established.” John H. Goldthorpe, “Causation, Statistics, and Sociology,” European Sociological Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2001), pp. 1-20, cited in Henry Brady and David Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), pp. 263-264.
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As Martin Hollis notes, Friedman’s version of the “as if” assumption “lets positive science dabble in unobservables, provided they are not thought more than useful fictions … I call this dabbling because there is no concession to the idea of unobservables existing in nature, as opposed to the model.” Martin Hollis, The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 56.
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Elster, Explaining Technical Change, pp. 23-24. In a more recent publication, Elster advances what he regards as “a somewhat more precise definition of the notion of a mechanism” than in his 1983 book. He does so, apparently, in order to move away from the position in his earlier book in which he regarded “the search for mechanisms as more or less synonymous with the reductionist strategy in science.” Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3-5.
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Daniel Little, for example, is among those who argue that all macro-social causal mechanisms must operate through the micro-social level of individual behavior. Little, Microfoundations, Methods, and Causation, p. 198.
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Dessler, “Dimensions of Progress,” p. 399. Dessler ties this discussion to Friedman’s essay “Methodology of Positive Economics,” 1953, stating in a footnote that “if predictive capacity is all that matters, the truth or falsity of a theory’s assumptions are irrelevant. But if we are interested in explanation as well as prediction, the truth of theories becomes an issue” (p. 399, n. 34).
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John Gribbin notes an “ongoing debate about whether there could be an underlying layer of reality beneath quantum mechanics that operates in a much more common-sense way but produces the weird quantum effects that are visible to our experiments … such an underlying clockwork reality is indeed allowed by the theory and experiments, provided that you have the instantaneous communication between entangled entities.” Washington Post, December 15, 2002, book review of Amir Aczel, Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002).
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Similarly, Elster suggests that the distinction between laws and mechanisms “is not a deep philosophical disagreement. A causal mechanism has a finite number of links. Each link will have to be described