After all, one of the central ingredients of a natural science conception of causallity is its subject independence. The causal process is unaffected by what any of us think about it or do in relation to it. Take the law of gravitation … we as subjects can act in light of such causal lasws, but we cannot modify, or be considered supports of, the laws themselves, whether intentionally or otherwise. The functioning of comparable processes … in the social sciences, however, is parasitic upon human practices, in the sense that they are constitutively sustained and mediated by the discursive activity of subjects. … the functioning of causal laws does not require the passage through the subject: the content of causal laws is not parasitic upon the subjects’ self-interpretations. This is why we prefer the term ‘logic’ to ‘mechanism’.
The term logic better avoids the connotations of subject independence that talk of causal laws and mechanisms suggest. At the same time, it allows us to maintain the central insight which prompted the turn to mechanisms in the first place, namely, that not all is reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations of subject: logics are thus meant to capture the subject-dependent aspect of social processes, as well as aspects which are not reducible to the empirical context. (97)