Discussions of the relations between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences have proliferated in recent years. Our article contributes to the philosophical and methodological foundations of the cognitive social sciences by proposing a framework based on contemporary mechanistic approaches to the philosophy of science to analyze the epistemological, ontological and methodological aspects of research programs at the intersection of the social sciences and the cognitive sciences. We apply this framework to three case studies which address the phenomena of social coordination, transactive memory, and ethnicity. We also assess how successful these research programs have been in providing mechanistic explanations for these phenomena, and where more work remains to be done.

evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses. In the final discussion, we compare different types of arguments and identify the most compelling reasons why the cognitive social sciences are needed. Argument from explanatory grounding One of the pioneers of the cognitive social sciences, Ron Sun, begins his introduction to the book, Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences, by claiming that cognitive explanations of social phenomena are often missing from the social sciences (Sun, 2012, p. 3). By cognitive explanation he means explanations that are based on the knowledge produced by the cognitive sciences. Then he argues that because "the cognitive sciences […] have made tremendous strides in recent decades" (p. 4) and because "minds […] are the basis of social processes and phenomena" (p. 5), "the cognitive sciences may serve as a basis for the social sciences, in much the same way that physics provides grounding for chemistry or quantum mechanics provides grounding for classical mechanics" (p. 5). Hence, according to Sun, "taking cognition-psychology into serious consideration would be a reasonable step in trying to reach an in-depth, fundamental understanding of social phenomena" (p. 5). Sun (2012) provides many examples in order to support his argument. For instance, he discusses

Cognitive sociology has been split into cultural and interdisciplinary traditions that position themselves differently in relation to the cognitive sciences and make incompatible assumptions about cognition. This article provides an analysis and assessment of the cognitive and methodological assumptions of these two traditions from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation. We argue that while the cultural tradition of cognitive sociology has provided important descriptions about how human cognition varies across cultural groups and historical periods, it has not opened up the black box of cognitive mechanisms that produce and sustain this variation. This means that its explanations for the described phenomena have remained weak. By contrast, the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology has sought to integrate cognitive scientific concepts and methods into explanatory research on how culture influences action and how culture is stored in memory. Although we grant that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists have brought many fresh ideas, concepts and methods to cultural sociology from the cognitive sciences, they have not always clarified their assumptions about cognition and their models have