{"id":70,"date":"2008-07-31T09:27:53","date_gmt":"2008-07-31T12:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/logocentric.wordpress.com\/?p=83"},"modified":"2008-09-14T00:53:38","modified_gmt":"2008-09-14T04:53:38","slug":"retroduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2008\/07\/31\/retroduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Causal Mechanisms (Elster)"},"content":{"rendered":"

What distinguishes causal mechanisms from causal laws is the indeterminacy<\/em> of the former, and the death knell this sounds for any attempt to make prediction a constitutive feature of social science explanation.\u00a0 More precisely, the lack of determinacy is understood as a serious epistemological obstacle to the elevation of mechanisms to the status of laws, whether this indeterminancy is linked to not knowing the identity of relevant triggering conditions, or to not knowing with sufficient precision the relative force of individual mechanisms acting simultaneously.\u00a0 Elster’s intervention thus decisively discredits one of the central pillars of the positivist paradigm by decoupling prediction, and thus a strict deductive-nomological form of reasoning, from social science explanation.\u00a0 While it may still be possible to offer predictions in social science, these predictions are understood to be constitutively precarious and, in any case, non-essential for purposes of explanation.\u00a0 It if for this reason that we feel justified in regarding his approach as conforming to a retroductive form of explanation in the social sciences (Glynos, Howarth, 2007 89).<\/p>\n

… from the fact that X qua process<\/em> is not reducible<\/em> to the contextualized self-interpretations or intentions of subjects, it does not necessarily — or only — follow that X is independent<\/em> of those contextualized self-interpretations or intentions.\u00a0 But this is precisely what is implied by Elster’s conception of causal mechanism. .. causal mechansims can be discussed entirely on their own, with no necessary internal connection<\/em> to intentional mechanisms.<\/p>\n

Of course, the subject-independent feature of causal mechanisms is very attractive from the perspective of a positivist programme seeking to import the causal law ideal and its correlative promise of (a certain conception of) objectivity into the social sciences.\u00a0 After all, one of the central ingredients of a natural science conception of causality is its subject-independence.\u00a0 The causal process is unaffected by what any of us think about it or do in relation to it.\u00a0 Take the law of gravitation for instance.\u00a0 At the very most, we as subjects can act in light<\/em> of such causal laws, but we cannot modify, or be considered supports of, the laws themselves, whether intentionally or otherwise.\u00a0 The functioning<\/em> of comparable processes (X) 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. <\/em><\/strong>If we insist on calling such a process a mechanism, then we must accept that, unlike laws, it has the property of fungibility, that is, it can suffer dissolution.\u00a0 At any point, the mechanism may find that it has lost its necessary support — intentional or otherwise — in the relevant subjects.\u00a0 Thus, mechanisms are not ‘proto’ laws that may one day be transofrmed into ‘proper’ causal laws.\u00a0 This is because the functioning<\/em> of causal laws does not require the passage through the subject: the content of causal laws is not parasitic upon the subjects’ self-interpretations.\u00a0 This is why we prefer the term ‘logic’ to ‘mechanism’.\u00a0 The term logic better avoids the connotations of subject-independence that talk of causal laws and mechanisms suggest.\u00a0 At the same time, it allows us to maintain the central insight which promoted the turn to mechanisms in the first place, namely, that not all is reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations of subjects: 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 (Glynos, Howarth, 2007: 97).<\/p>\n

While Elster’s theory of causal mechanisms responds to certain limitations of the causal law paradigm, he nevertheless accepts the search for laws as an ideal.\u00a0 And on of the reasons for this is the atomistic ontological grounding of his account, in which the world consists of discrete events, facts, and mechanisms.\u00a0 103<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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