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This volume contends that Evidential Pluralism-an account of the epistemology of causation, which maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one needs to establish the existence of a correlation and the existence of a mechanism-can be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. Through case studies in sociology, economics, political science and law, it advances new philosophical foundations for causal enquiry in the social sciences. The book provides an account of how to establish and evaluate causal claims and it offers a new way of thinking about evidence-based policy, basic social science research and mixed methods research. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social science research and methodology, the philosophy of science and evidence-based policy.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
List of contents
I Philosophical Framework
1 Evidential Pluralism
1. What is Evidential Pluralism?
2. Why is Evidential Pluralism Plausible?
3. Evidential Pluralism and EBM+
4. Controversies and Clarifications
5. Evidential Pluralism and Epistemic Causality
6. Applying Evidential Pluralism to the Social Sciences
2 Historical Roots
7. Bernard
8. Weldon
9. Goldthorpe
10. How does Evidential Pluralism differ?
II Consequences and Concerns
3 Evidence-Based Policy: EBP+
11. EBM and EBP
12. EBP+ Evaluation Procedures
13. EBP+ in Comparison to Existing Approaches
4 Mixed Methods Research
14. The Context of the Origins of Mixed Methods Research
15. Mixed Methods Research and its Philosophical Foundations
16. A Critical Analysis
17. Evidential Pluralism and Mixed Methods Research
5 Objections and Responses
18. Objection 1: The Problem of Sufficiency
19. Objection 2: The Problem of Necessity
20. Objection 3: The Problem of Causal Monism
21. Objection 4: The Problem of Defining Mechanisms
III Particular Social Sciences
6 Sociology
22. Causal Enquiry in Sociology
23. Sociologists' Methodological Reflections on Causal Enquiry
7 Economics
24. Causal Enquiry in Economics
25. Benefits of Evidential Pluralism in Economics
26. Mechanisms and Theory in Economics
27. Causal and Methodological Pluralism in Economics
8 Political Science
28. The Need for Methodological Diversity in Political Science
29. Case Study: Resource Wealth and Violence in Rebellions
30. Understanding Causal Enquiry in Political Science
9 Law
31. The Bifurcation Approach to Causation in the Law
32. The Bifurcation Approach and Evidential Pluralism
33. Liability-Tracing Mechanisms
34. Against Causal Autonomy in the Law
10 The Scope of Evidential Pluralism in the Social Sciences
35. Across the social sciences
36. Where we stand
Bibliography
About the author
Yafeng Shan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is the author of Doing Integrated History and Philosophy of Science: A Case Study of the Origin of Genetics and the editor of New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress.
Jon Williamson is Professor of Reasoning, Inference, and Scientific Method at the University of Kent, UK. His books include Evaluating Evidence of Mechanisms in Medicine, Lectures on Inductive Logic, Probabilistic Logics and Probabilistic Networks, In Defence of Objective Bayesianism and Bayesian Nets and Causality.
Summary
Through case studies in sociology, economics and legal studies, this book advances new philosophical foundations for the methods of the social sciences, providing an account of how to establish or evaluate causal claims, and offering a new way of thinking about evidence-based policy, basic social science research and mixed methods research.
