Mechanistic explanation in social contexts: Elster and the problem of local scientific growth
Jon Elster worries about the explanatory power of the social sciences. His main concern is that they have so few well-established laws. Elster (2007) develops an interesting substitute: a special kind of mechanism designed to fill the explanatory gap between laws and mere description. However, his mechanisms suffer from a characteristic problem which I will explore in this article. As our causal k
