Causality in Crisis: Statistical Methods and the Search for Causal Knowledge in the Social Sciences (Studies in Science and the Humanities from the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, Volume IV) [Paperback]

Vaughn R. McKim (Editor), Stephen P. Turner (Editor), Stephen Turner (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 420 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Notre Dame Pr (October 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0268008248
• ISBN-13: 978-0268008246
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,875,329 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

If you have stumbled on to this page, you are probably wondering what all these books are doing together, and how anyone would have an "also bought" list that runs, depending on the day, from Kant to Elster and Daston to Ritzer. They all do belong here. The connecting thread is this: I have always been drawn to basic questions about what sort of knowledge of the social world and history is possible, and by the implications of these questions.

I started out asking philosophical and methodological questions about social science and social and political theory. Now I mostly ask social theory questions about philosophy. Most of this is informed by the history of these subjects. Knowing something about the history of these questions is a good thing, but it is also a curse. It is difficult to read the latest word on, for example, philosophical problems with causal modeling, without the grim recognition that the author has unknowingly recycled solutions that were available a century ago.

These basic methodological topics may seem to be a bit of a bore. Weber, on which I have spent much of my ink, may seem like a distant and dusty figure. But the topics, and Weber's writing in particular, open onto a vast variety of subjects and literatures, and provide a special, privileged access to them. And despite the forbidding titles, the books (and my other writings) are full of the human presence of great and not so great thinkers.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Gordian knots dangle a mythical Holy Grail, March 3, 2006

By 

Thomas J. Hickey (River Forest, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Causality in Crisis: Statistical Methods and the Search for Causal Knowledge in the Social Sciences (Studies in Science and the Humanities from the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, Volume IV) (Paperback)

This book offers interesting reading, particularly the Carnegie Mellon contributions. But I am disappointed in the book's atavistic philosophy of science - notably about causality.

In his "Introduction" McKim distinguishes experimental and nonexperimental testing for identifying causality. I see this difference as merely a technical matter about testing that affects the degree of confidence in a theory, not a philosophical issue about causality.

When McKim writes of "underlying structure of causal relationships" I believe he has misconceived causality. In his book titled Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry Into the Conceptual Foundations of Science philosopher Russell Hanson wrote that cause words are "theory-loaded" (p.60). This is a variation on Willard Quine's ontological relativity. Causality is a reality. Thus causal claims are ontological claims, and all questions of ontology are subordinated to the empirical adequacy of a tested theory. And that includes models. I am surprised that McKim, once a student of Hanson's at Yale, has overloked these contemporary pragmatist views.

Causality is claimed by a nonfalsified theory, whether the theory's testing was experimental or nonexperimantal, and a theory's causal claim is acceptable until falsified empirically.

I also believe the authors have misconceived language, when they are dismayed that the same explained data admit to multiple models that are equally adequate empirically. As Quine notes, all language is empirically underdetermined, and that includes models.

These contributors seek a Holy Grail called "causality", and so they are in crisis. But there is no need to unravel the Gordian knots in these papers to find causality. Tested theories make causal claims, all theories are subject to further testing, and all causal claims are subject to revision. And they are often revised; there are no guarantees in science.

Contemporary pragmatism thus cuts through their Gordian knots, and consigns their mythical Holy Grail to the dustbin of history of philosophy. For more extensive comments Google to my site, History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science, for free downloads.

Thomas J. Hickey, Econometrician