TY - JOUR T1 - Social mechanisms, causal inference, and the policy relevance of social science JF - Philosophy of the Social Sciences Y1 - 2007 A1 - Weber, Erik AB -

The paper has two aims. First, to show that we need social mechanisms to establish the policy relevance of causal claims, even if it is possible to build a good argument for those claims without knowledge of mechanisms. Second, to show that although social scientists can, in principle, do without social mechanisms when they argue for causal claims, in reality scientific practice contexts where they do not need mechanisms are very rare.

VL - 37 SP - 348–359 ER -