During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanations 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 mechanismbased explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The second part focuses on how the idea of mechanisms has been used in the social sciences. The final part discusses recent developments in analytical sociology, covering the nature of sociological explananda, the role of theory of action in mechanism-based explanations, Merton's idea of middle-range theory, and the role of agent-based simulations in the development of mechanism-based explanations.

This paper discusses the epistemic import of highly abstract and simplified theoretical models using Thomas Schelling's checkerboard model as an example. We argue that the epistemic contribution of theoretical models can be better understood in the context of a cluster of models relevant to the explanatory task at hand. The central claim of the paper is that theoretical models make better sense in the context of the menu of possible explanations. In order to justify this claim, we introduce a distinction between causal scenarios and causal mechanism schemes.These conceptual tools help us to articulate the basis for modelers' intuitive confidence that their models make an important epistemic contribution. By focusing on the role of the menu of possible explanations in the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, it is possible to understand how a causal mechanism scheme can improve our explanatory understanding even in cases where it does not describe the actual cause of a particular phenomenon. Highly abstract and simplified theoretical models have an important role in many sciences, for example, in evolutionary biology and economics. Although both scientists and philosophers have expressed doubts about the epistemic import of these idealized models, many scientists believe that they provide explanatory insight into real-world phenomena. Understanding the epistemic value of these abstract representations is one of the key challenges for philosophers of science who attempt to make sense of scientific modeling. In this paper we will examine ThomasSchelling's checkerboard model as an example of abstract theoretical models and articulate various ways in which it expands the social scientific understanding of segregation processes.We argue that the epistemic contribution of theoretical models can only be fully understood in the context of a cluster of models relevant to the explanatory task at hand. To disambiguate this claim, we introduce a distinction between two different cluster claims. The first, the family of models thesis, states that the epistemic value of theoretical models is not well understood if they are treated as isolated representations. It makes more sense when considered in the context of as a family of related models. Our second cluster claim, the competing causal mechanisms thesis, says that the full epistemic contribution of theoretical models can only be understood in the context of competing explanations for the same phenomenon. In other words, theoretical models make better sense in the context of the menu of possible explanations.The structure of the paper is as follows. In the first section, we start by making some observations about Schelling's famous checkerboard model and introduce our two cluster theses in the second section. In order to understand our second thesis, which brings up the contribution of the menu of possible explanations, it is necessary to understand the nature of how-possibly explanations (HPEs). Thus, in the third section, we introduce an enriched account of HPEs ...

Comparisons of rival explanations or theories often involve vague appeals to explanatory power. In this paper, we dissect this metaphor by distinguishing between different dimensions of the goodness of an explanation: non-sensitivity, cognitive salience, precision, detail, factual accuracy and degree of integration. These dimensions are partially independent and often come into conflict. Our main contribution is to go beyond simple stipulation or description by explicating why these factors are taken to be explanatory virtues in the first place. We accomplish this by using the contrastive-counterfactual approach to explanation and the view of understanding as an inferential ability. By combining these perspectives, we show how the explanatory power of an explanation in a given dimension can be assessed by showing the range of answers it provides to what-if-things-had-been-different questions and the theoretical and pragmatic importance of these questions. We also show how our account explains intuitions linking explanation to unification or to the exhibition of a mechanism.

Comparisons of rival explanations or theories often involve vague appeals to explanatory power. In this paper, we dissect this metaphor by distinguishing between different dimensions of the goodness of an explanation: non-sensitivity, cognitive salience, precision, detail, factual accuracy and degree of integration. These dimensions are partially independent and often come into conflict. Our main contribution is to go beyond simple stipulation or description by explicating why these factors are taken to be explanatory virtues in the first place. We accomplish this by using the contrastive-counterfactual approach to explanation and the view of understanding as an inferential ability. By combining these perspectives, we show how the explanatory power of an explanation in a given dimension can be assessed by showing the range of answers it provides to what-if-things-had-been-different questions and the theoretical and pragmatic importance of these questions. We also show how our account explains intuitions linking explanation to unification or to the exhibition of a mechanism.Keywords: explanation; understanding; explanatory power; inference to the best explanation Opening up the metaphorPeople evaluate and compare explanations all the time. These judgments of explanatory merit are often expressed using metaphorical notions of explanatory depth and explanatory power.Philosophers too use these notions to argue for their favorite views or theories. However, the is not the case -scientists and philosophers seem to attribute explanatory power based on quite different implicit principles or without any principles at all. In this paper we endeavor to improve this situation in two ways. First, we will distinguish five dimensions of explanatory power and discuss their relationship to each other. The idea is to describe those properties of explanations that usually prompt people to attribute the metaphorical quality of "power" to them. Second, we will present arguments that attempt to explain why improvement in these dimensions can legitimately be regarded as improvement in explanatory understanding. We will also spell out how judgments of explanatory power can involve confusion about the explanatory and evidential virtues of a proposed explanation.We will talk about "explanatory power", but the points will also apply to the notion of "depth of explanation". There is no standardized way of distinguishing between these notions. One person's "depth" might be another person's "power" and vice versa. The only difference seems to be that "power" is only employed in contexts in which two explanations are compared with respect to their explanatory qualities, whereas "depth" is also used in non-comparative contexts. For example, one might talk about increased "depth" in situations where an explanation explains a presupposition of another explanation (for example, by providing a mechanism). We will not discuss these interesting cases in this paper.It is important to distinguish between explanatory and evidential virtues of e...

Abstract. 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 building and causal manipulation, causation and constitution are not to be confused. Constitution is a synchronous and asymmetric relation between relata that cannot be conceived as independent existences. However, despite their metaphysical differences, the same key ideas about explanation largely apply to both. Causal and constitutive explanations face similar challenges (such as the problems of relevance and explanatory regress) and both are in the business of mapping networks of counterfactual dependence -i.e. mechanisms -although the relevant counterfactuals are of a different sort. In the final section the issue of developmental explanation is discussed. It is argued that developmental explanations deserve their own place in taxonomy of explanations, although ultimately developmental dependencies can be analyzed as combinations of causal and constitutive dependencies. Hence, causal and constitutive explanation are distinct, but not always completely separate forms of explanation.Science is in the business of explaining things. Philosophers of explanation have rightly paid much attention to causal explanation, and some have even suggested that all scientific explanations are causal. However, most philosophers of explanation recognize that there is an important class of non-causal explanations, although it has received much less attention. These explanations are conventionally called constitutive explanations (following Salmon (1984), who introduced the distinction between etiological and constitutive explanations). Constitutive explanations explain how things have the causal capacities they have by appealing to their parts and their organization. 1Published as Ylikoski, Petri 2013 'Causal and constitutive explanation compared', Erkenntnis 78, 277-297.