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Social Mechanisms, Causal Inference, and the Policy Relevance of Social Science

Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, Belgium

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.

Key Words: social mechanisms • causal inference • social policy

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 37, No. 3, 348-359 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0048393107303814


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