1: Explanation
Social science aims to explain social life. Something that is an explanation:
- Allows us to intervene in what we are explaining
- Rarely will this happen in social science. Often times, there are multiple causes for what we seek to explain.
- Allows us to stop looking for further explanations of what we are explaining
- This is when we stop the chain of thing x causes y which is caused by z which is caused by… It is the thing that we can all agree on to move on.
- This occurs when we’ve hit something that:
- Explains itself (a logical/mathematical truth)
- Requires no external cause (a foundational natural law)
- Is the accepted primitive in the given framework
- Is a “pleasing” argument made about the thing we are explaining
- ==how is this different from how the author describes type 2, which is “translating a phenomenon… until… we are intuitively satisfied”?
Social science, according to Abbott, has six successful methodological traditions:
- Ethnography
- Living inside the social situation one is studying and becoming to some extent a participant in it.
- Historical narration
- Why did such and such event take place?
- Reading primary documents. With context in mind.
- Standard causal analysis
- Takes large numbers of cases, measures various aspects of them, and employs statistical models to draw inferences about the relationships among those masurements.
- Small-N comparison
- Formalization