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The division of labour in the social sciences versus the politics of metaphysics. Questioning Critical Realism's interdisciplinarity.Graduate Journal of Social Science 2 (2): 32-39. 2005.Some scholars claim that Critical Realism promises well for the unification of the social sciences, e.g., "Unifying social science: A critical realist approach" in this volume. I will first show briefly how Critical Realism might unify social science. Secondly, I focus on the relation between the ontology and methodology of Critical Realism, and unveil the politics of metaphysics. Subsequently, it is argued that the division of labour between social scientific disciplines should not be metaphysi…Read more
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163Forms of causal explanationFoundations of Science 10 (4): 437-454. 2005.In the literature on scientific explanation two types of pluralism are very common. The first concerns the distinction between explanations of singular facts and explanations of laws: there is a consensus that they have a different structure. The second concerns the distinction between causal explanations and uni.cation explanations: most people agree that both are useful and that their structure is different. In this article we argue for pluralism within the area of causal explanations: we clai…Read more
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16Understanding in political science: The plurality of epistemic interests.In Henk De Regt, Sabina Leonelli & Kai Eigner (eds.), Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives, University of Pittsburgh Press. 2009.
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53Book Review of "Unsimple Truths. Science, Complexity and Policy" by Sandra Mitchell (2009) (Reprint)International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group Newsletter 26-33. 2012.
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42Explanation in the Social Sciences.In Ian Jarvie Jesus Zamora Bonilla (ed.), The Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences., Sage Publications. 2011.
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36The idea of social mechanisms in social scientific explanations.In John Arlsdale (ed.), Advances in Social Psychology Research, Nova Science Publishers. 2006.
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9Explanatory pluralismIn Edward Fullbrook (ed.), Pluralist economics, Distributed in the Usa Exclusively By Palgrave Macmillan. 2008.
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189Scientific ExplanationSpringer. 2013.When scientist investigate why things happen, they aim at giving an explanation. But what does a scientific explanation look like? In the first chapter (Theories of Scientific Explanation) of this book, the milestones in the debate on how to characterize scientific explanations are exposed. The second chapter (How to Study Scientific Explanation?) scrutinizes the working-method of three important philosophers of explanation, Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon and shows what went wron…Read more
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56This paper investigates the working-method of three important philosophers of explanation: Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon. We argue that they do three things: construct an explication in the sense of Carnap, which then is used as a tool to make descriptive and normative claims about the explanatory practice of scientists. We also show that they did well with respect to, but that they failed to give arguments for their descriptive and normative claims. We think it is the responsibi…Read more
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101What is there beyond Mertonian and dollar green science? Exploring the contours of epistemic democracy.In Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Frederik Le Roy, Christel Stalpaert & Diederik Aerts (eds.), Drunk on capitalism : an interdisciplinary reflection on market economy, art and science., Springer. pp. 35-48. 2012.The story is sometimes told as follows: Once science was a disinterested activity giving scientists the opportunity to freely solve the puzzle of nature to the benefit of all. Nowadays science seems more and more driven by the search for patents and dollars compelling scientists to follow the logic of capitalism and corporatization. Take-home lesson: science is for sale and we should do everything to reverse this evolution. In this contribution, I want to analyze the narrator’s assumptions impli…Read more
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136Pluralists about Pluralism? Versions of Explanatory Pluralism in Psychiatry.In M. C. Galavotti, D. Dieks, W. J. Gonzalez, S. Hartmann, Th Uebel & M. Weber (eds.), New Directions in Philosophy of Science (The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective Series), Springer. pp. 105-119. 2014.In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pl…Read more
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6Critical realism and methodological pluralism in the social sciencesPhilosophica 71 13-38. 2003.The question of whether Critical Realism has committed an "ontological fallacy" in revealing the "epistemic fallacy" in social scientific research is addressed. An overview of Critical Realism's treatment of the connection between epistemology & ontology, which culminated in the unveiling of the epistemic fallacy, is provided. Critical Realism's understanding of explanation as it applies to social scientific inquiry is then explored to determine whether such thought has committed the ontological…Read more
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92Indispensability arguments in favour of reductive explanations.Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (1): 33-46. 2011.Instances of explanatory reduction are often advocated on metaphysical grounds; given that the only real things in the world are subatomic particles and their interaction, we have to try to explain everything in terms of the laws of physics. In this paper, we show that explanatory reduction cannot be defended on metaphysical grounds. Nevertheless, indispensability arguments for reductive explanations can be developed, taking into account actual scientific practice and the role of epistemic inter…Read more
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58Assessing the explanatory power of causal explanations.In Johannes Persson & Petri Ylikoski (eds.), Rethinking Explanation., Springer. 2007.
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27The living apart together relationship of causation and explanation: A comment on Jean LachapellePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (4): 560-569. 2002.
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234Explanatory Strategies beyond The Individualism/Holism DebateIn Julie Zahle & Finn Collin (eds.), Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate, Springer. pp. 105-119. 2014.Starting from the plurality of explanatory strategies in the actual practice of socialscientists, I introduce a framework for explanatory pluralism – a normative endorsement of the plurality of forms and levels of explanation used by social scientists. Equipped with thisframework, central issues in the individualism/holism debate are revisited, namely emergence,reduction and the idea of microfoundations. Discussing these issues, we notice that in recentcontributions the focus has been shifting t…Read more
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117Introduction: Social Epistemology Meets the Philosophy of the HumanitiesFoundations of Science 21 (1): 1-13. 2016.From time to time, when I explain to a new acquaintance that I’m a philosopher of science, my interlocutor will nod agreeably and remark that that surely means I’m interested in the ethical status of various kinds of scientific research, the impact that science has had on our values, or the role that the sciences play in contemporary democracies. Although this common response hardly corresponds to what professional philosophers of science have done for the past decades, or even centuries, it is …Read more
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29An atlas for the social world: what should it (not) look like? Interdisciplinarity and pluralism in the social sciences.In D. Aerts, B. D'Hooghe, R. Pinxten & I. Wallerstein (eds.), Worldviews, Science and Us: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Worlds, Cultures and Society, World Scientific.. 2011.
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83Symposium on explanations and social ontology 3: Can we dispense with structural explanations of social facts?Economics and Philosophy 18 (2): 259-275. 2002.Some social scientists and philosophers (e.g., James Coleman and Jon Elster) claim that all social facts are best explained by means of a micro-explanation. They defend a micro-reductionism in the social sciences: to explain is to provide a mechanism on the individual level. The first aim of this paper is to challenge this view and defend the view that it has to be substituted for an explanatory pluralism with two components: (1) structural explanations of P-, O- and T-contrasts between social f…Read more
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60Why social emergence? Discussing the use of analytical metaphysics in social theory.In Robrecht Vanderbeeken & Bart D'Hooghe (eds.), Worldviews, Science and Us: Studies of Analytical Metaphysics., World Scientific. 2010.
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25Questioning structurism as a new standard for social scientific explanationsGraduate Journal of Social Science 1 (2): 204-226. 2004.As the literature on Critical Realism in the social sciences is growing, it is about time to analyse whether a new, acceptable standard for social scientific explanations is being introduced. In order to do so, I will discuss the work of Christopher Lloyd, who analysed contributions of social scientists that rely on (what he called) a structurist ontology and a structurist methodology, and advocated a third option in the methodological debate between individualism and holism. I will suggest modi…Read more
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269Causation, Unification, and the Adequacy of Explanations of FactsTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 24 (3): 301-320. 2009.Pluralism with respect to the structure of explanations of facts is not uncommon. Wesley Salmon, for instance, distinguished two types of explanation: causal explanations (which provide insight in the causes of the fact we want to explain) and unification explanations (which fit the explanandum into a unified world view). The pluralism which Salmon and others have defended is compatible with several positions about the exact relation between these two types of explanations. We distinguish four s…Read more
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137Towards Democratic Models of Science: Exploring the Case of Scientific PluralismPerspectives on Science 23 (2): 149-172. 2015.Scientific pluralism, a normative endorsement of the plurality or multiplicity of research approaches in science, has recently been advocated by several philosophers (e.g., Kellert et al. 2006, Kitcher 2001, Longino 2013, Mitchell 2009, and Chang 2010). Comparing these accounts of scientific pluralism, one will encounter quite some variation. We want to clarify the different interpretations of scientific pluralism by showing how they incarnate different models of democracy, stipulating the desir…Read more
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96Coping with inconsistencies: Examples form the social sciences.Logic and Logical Philosophy 14 (1): 89-101. 2005.In this paper we present two case studies on inconsistencies in the social sciences. The first is devoted to sociologist George Caspar Homans and his exchange theory. We argue that his account of how he arrived at his theory is highly misleading, because it ignores the inconsistencies he had to cope with. In the second case study we analyse how John Maynard Keynes coped with the inconsistency between classical economic theory and real economic conditions in developing his path-breaking theory
Ghent, Belgium
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Social Science |
General Philosophy of Science |
Social Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Social Sciences |