•  11
    Eliciting the plurality of causal reasoning in social-ecological systems research
    with Tilman Hertz, T. Homas Banitz, Rodrigo Martínez-Peña, Sonja Radosavljevic, Emilie Lindkvist, Lars-Göran Johansson, and Maja Schlüter
    Understanding causation in social-ecological systems (SES) is indispensable for promoting sustainable outcomes. However, the study of such causal relations is challenging because they are often complex and intertwined, and their analysis involves diverse disciplines. Although there is agreement that no single research approach (RA) can comprehensively explain SES phenomena, there is a lack of ability to deal with this diversity. Underlying this diversity and the challenge of dealing with it are …Read more
  • Explaining institutional change
    In Harold Kincaid & Jeroen van Bouwel (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Political Science, Oxford University Press. 2023.
  •  316
    Explaining Institutional Change
    In Harold Kincaid & Jeroen van Bouwel (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Political Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 120-138. 2023.
    In this Chapter, we address the challenge of explaining institutional change, asking whether the much-criticized rational choice perspective can contribute to the understanding of institutional change in political science. We discuss the methodological reasons why rational choice institutionalism (RCI) often assumes that institutional change is exogenous and discontinuous. We then identify and explore the possible pathways along which RCI can be extended to be more useful in understanding instit…Read more
  •  69
    Humanistic interpretation and machine learning
    with Juho Pääkkönen
    Synthese 199. 2021.
    This paper investigates how unsupervised machine learning methods might make hermeneutic interpretive text analysis more objective in the social sciences. Through a close examination of the uses of topic modeling—a popular unsupervised approach in the social sciences—it argues that the primary way in which unsupervised learning supports interpretation is by allowing interpreters to discover unanticipated information in larger and more diverse corpora and by improving the transparency of the inte…Read more
  •  81
    We argue that the appraisal of models in social epistemology requires conceiving of them as argumentative devices, taking into account the argumentative context and adopting a family-of-models perspective. We draw up such an account and show how it makes it easier to see the value and limits of the use of models in social epistemology. To illustrate our points, we document and explicate the argumentative role of epistemic landscape models in social epistemology and highlight their limitations. W…Read more
  •  36
    Case study research in the social sciences
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 78 (C): 1-4. 2019.
    In this paper, we offer an introduction to case study research in the social sciences. We begin with a discussion of the definition of case study research. Next, we point to various purposes that case study research may serve in the social sciences and then turn to outline the main philosophical issues raised by case study research. Finally, we briefly present the papers in this special issue.
  • Yhteiskuntatieteellinen tutkimus on pohjimmiltaan kysymyksiin vastaamista. Kysymysten avulla hahmotellaan yhteiskunnallisille ilmiöille syitä ja seurauksia. Mikä rooli syy-seuraussuhteiden ymmärtämisellä sitten on arvioitaessa ja täsmennettäessä yhteiskuntatieteellisiä selitysmalleja? Kausaalinen järkeily ja selittäminen läpäisee kaikkea yhteiskuntatieteellistä tutkimusta tutkimusmenetelmistä ja -asetelmista riippumatta. Kausaalisuuden käsitettä, kausaalisuhteita ja kausaalisia päätelmiä koskevi…Read more
  •  50
    Mechanism-based theorizing and generalization from case studies
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 78 (C): 14-22. 2019.
    Generalization from a case study is a perennial issue in the methodology of the social sciences. The case study is one of the most important research designs in many social scientific fields, but no shared understanding exists of the epistemic import of case studies. This article suggests that the idea of mechanism-based theorizing provides a fruitful basis for understanding how case studies contribute to a general understanding of social phenomena. This approach is illustrated with a re- constr…Read more
  •  61
    Three Conceptions of a Theory of Institutions
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (6): 550-568. 2018.
    We compare Guala’s unified theory of institutions with that of Searle and Greif. We show that unification can be many things and it may be associated with diverse explanatory goals. We also highlight some of the important shortcomings of Guala’s account: it does not capture all social institutions, its ability to bridge social ontology and game theory is based on a problematic interpretation of the type-token distinction, and its ability to make social ontology useful for social sciences is hind…Read more
  •  8
    Harry Collins and the Crisis of Expertise
    Science & Education 25 (3-4): 461-464. 2016.
  •  55
    Comment on Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology
    Journal of Social Ontology 1 (2): 333-340. 2015.
    This comment discusses Kaidesoja and raises the issue whether his analysis justifies stronger conclusions than he presents in the book. My comments focus on four issues. First, I argue that his naturalistic reconstruction of critical realist transcendental arguments shows that transcendental arguments should be treated as a rare curiosity rather than a general argumentative strategy. Second, I suggest that Kaidesoja’s analysis does not really justify his optimism about the usefulness of causal p…Read more
  •  28
    Addiction-as-a-kind hypothesis
    International Journal of Addiction and Drug Research 4 (1): 21-25. 2015.
    The psychiatric category of addiction has recently been broadened to include new behaviors. This has prompted critical discussion about the value of a concept that covers so many different substances and activities. Many of the debates surrounding the notion of addiction stem from different views concerning what kind of a thing addiction fundamentally is. In this essay, we put forward an account that conceptualizes different addictions as sharing a cluster of relevant properties (the syndrome) t…Read more
  •  54
    Many of the arguments for neuroeconomics rely on mistaken assumptions about criteria of explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries and fail to distinguish between evidential and explanatory relevance. Building on recent philosophical work on mechanistic research programmes and the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation, we argue that explaining an explanatory presupposition or providing a lower-level explanation does not necessarily constitute explanatory improvement. Neurosc…Read more
  •  172
    Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences
    with Peter Hedström
    Annual Review of Sociology 36. 2010.
    During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism- based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The sec…Read more
  •  46
    Micro, macro, and mechanisms
    In Harold Kincaid (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 21. 2012.
    is chapter takes a fresh look at micro-macro relations in the social sciences from the point of view of the mechanistic account of explanation. Traditionally, micro- macro issues have been assimilated to the problem of methodological individualism. It is not my intention to resurrect this notoriously unfruitful controversy. On the contrary, the main thrust of this chapter is to show that the cul-de-sac of that debate can be avoided if we give up some of its presuppositions. The debate about meth…Read more
  •  238
    Causal and Constitutive Explanation Compared
    Erkenntnis 78 (2): 277-297. 2013.
    This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their interrelations. These explanations have different kinds of explananda and they track different sorts of dependencies. Constitutive explanations do not address events or behaviors, but causal capacities. While there are some interesting relations between buildin…Read more
  •  148
    Generative Explanation and Individualism in Agent-Based Simulation
    with Caterina Marchionni
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (3): 323-340. 2013.
    Social scientists associate agent-based simulation (ABS) models with three ideas about explanation: they provide generative explanations, they are models of mechanisms, and they implement methodological individualism. In light of a philosophical account of explanation, we show that these ideas are not necessarily related and offer an account of the explanatory import of ABS models. We also argue that their bottom-up research strategy should be distinguished from methodological individualism
  •  60
    The Invisible Hand and Science
    Science Studies 8 (2): 32-43. 1995.
    In this paper I will discuss the idea of the invisible hand in the connection of its recent use in the philosophy of science. It has been invoked by some philosophers of science with a naturalistic bent as a part of their account of science. Some have made explicit references to the idea (Hull, 1988a) and others have only presupposed it (Giere, 1988; Goldman, 1991; Kitcher, 1993). I will argue that there are some problematic features in the way the idea of the invisible hand isused inthese acco…Read more
  •  32
    This paper provides a conceptual analysis of the notion of interests as it is used in the social studies of science. After describing the theoretical background behind the Strong Program's adoption of the concept of interest, the paper outlines a reconstruction of the everyday notion of interest and argues that this same notion is used also by the sociologists of scientific knowledge. However, there are a couple of important differences between the everyday use of this notion and the way in whic…Read more
  •  83
    Agent-Based Simulation and Sociological Understanding
    Perspectives on Science 22 (3): 318-335. 2014.
    This article discusses agent-based simulation (ABS) as a tool of sociological understanding. I argue that agent-based simulations can play an important role in the expansion of explanatory understanding in the social sciences. The argument is based on an inferential account of understanding (Ylikoski 2009, Ylikoski & Kuorikoski 2010), according to which computer simulations increase our explanatory understanding by expanding our ability to make what-if inferences about social processes and by ma…Read more
  •  130
    External representations and scientific understanding
    Synthese 192 (12): 3817-3837. 2015.
    This paper provides an inferentialist account of model-based understanding by combining a counterfactual account of explanation and an inferentialist account of representation with a view of modeling as extended cognition. This account makes it understandable how the manipulation of surrogate systems like models can provide genuinely new empirical understanding about the world. Similarly, the account provides an answer to the question how models, that always incorporate assumptions that are lite…Read more
  •  14
    Explaining Practices
    ProtoSociology 18 317-333. 2003.
    This paper discusses Stephen Turner’s recent critique of theories of social practices. It shows that his arguments are valid against common explanatory uses of these concepts, but not against practices in general. There are plenty of legitimate non-explanatory uses for practice concepts. The paper also suggests that Turner’s main arguments derive from two principles that have much wider application than practice theories. Consequently, they should be considered as general constraints on every so…Read more