GLOSSARY OF TERMS-I

Causation

Learning the cause, or causes, of something is often important for explaining it and for designing
effective plans for changing it in desired ways. Not surprisingly, then, questions of causation are usually
at issue when social scientists offer explanations or policy advice. For example, economists might
attempt to learn about the causes of economic recessions in order to explain why they happened when
they did as well as to offer helpful suggestions to politicians about how to reduce the chance that one
will occur in the near future.
There are, however, a number of long-standing philosophical issues related to causation. One group of
issues concerns the concept of causation itself: A variety of conflicting theories about the nature of
causation exist, and a few philosophers have even argued that the concept is bankrupt and should be
dispensed with altogether. A second class of issues has to do with how knowledge about cause and
effect can be acquired. It is generally agreed that correctly inferring cause-and-effect relationships in
social science is very difficult, and philosophers and social scientists have offered a number of,
sometimes competing, proposals about how, or whether, those difficulties may be overcome. This entry
treats these two issues in turn, discussing some interconnections between them and some implications
for social science methodology. We normally think of causation as something “out there” in the world. It
seems an obvious and objective fact of nature that some things make other things happen. But several
illustrious figures in the history of Western philosophy have argued that this commonsense idea of the
objective reality of causation is an illusion. In particular, both David Hume and Bertrand Russell argued
that causation, as it is normally understood, does not exist in the physical world but is instead largely a
projection of the human mind onto experience. Hume asks us to consider examples of cause and effect,
for instance, one billiard ball colliding with another and sending it into the corner pocket. When we
examine such examples as carefully as we can, Hume says, we only observe three basic features: (1)
temporal priority (the cause happens before the effect), (2) contiguity (the cause is adjacent to the
effect in space and time), and (3) constant conjunction (events like the cause are always followed by
events like the effect). According to Hume, this is all causation really is in the world. This is Hume’s first
or “philosophical” definition of causation. But Hume points out that our ordinary concept of cause and
effect involves more than just this. It includes the idea of a necessary connection between cause and
effect: We think that given the cause, the effect had to happen. But Hume claims that, try as we might,
we cannot observe any such connection between objects in the world. According to Hume, the source of
our idea of necessary connection is internal rather than external. After having repeatedly observed
events of Type A being followed by events of Type B, we feel, upon seeing a new instance of A, a strong
and vivid expectation of B. Our mind then projects that expectation onto external objects. This leads to
Hume’s second or “natural” definition of causation, namely, that c is a cause of e if c is prior and
contiguous toe and the observation of c “determines the mind to form” a vivid idea of e. Thus, Hume
thinks that causation as normally understood is, to a significant extent, an illusion: We think it is “out
there” in the external objects, but the most important element of it—necessary connection—is
something that our mind projects on what we observe. Bertrand Russell agreed with Hume’s arguments
about necessary connections not really being “out there” in the world. But Russell took skepticism about
causation one step further. He argued that Hume’s first, or “philosophical,” definition of causation does
not correspond to anything physically real either. More specifically, Russell argued that Hume’s first
definition of causation cannot correspond to anything in the world if modern physics is true. Russell
claimed that laws of physics (here he was thinking primarily of Newtonian mechanics) do not include any
reference to time; they do not say things such as “When A happens, B follows.” Rather, they state
relations among features of the world at a given instant. For example, Newton’s law of gravitation says
that the gravitational force between two objects is directly proportional to the product of their masses
and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Moreover, any empirical
generalization of the form “When A happens, B follows” that could be stated by humans would have
exceptions. The reason is that some event might intervene after the occurrence ofA to prevent B. Thus,
Russell reasoned, if we accept Hume’s first definition of causation, it follows that trying to discover
cause and effect (and telling scientists that this is what they should be doing) is a waste of time, or
worse. Our best option, Russell thought, is to jettison the notion of cause altogether. Instead of
causation, Russell thought that it would be best to talk about the sorts of functional dependencies
represented in physical laws, such as Newton’s law of gravitation. Another variant of this type of view,
which also appeared around the turn of the 20th century, was advocated by the statistician Karl
Pearson, who argued that the notion of causation should be replaced by the (then) newly invented
statistical concept of correlation.

Determinism

1. The philosophical doctrine that everything that happens is determined by that which preceded it.
More precisely: nature is governed by ‘deterministic’ laws, such that, given a complete description of
the world at one time and a statement of those laws, a complete description of the world at any later
time may be deduced. Determinism is sometimes thought to imply that all events happen by necessity,
and that nothing could be other than it is. However, this obscures an important distinction, between
*fatalism, and what *J.S. Mill called ‘philosophical necessity’, which denotes only the operation of
universal natural laws. Philosophers debate over (a) whether or not determinism is, or could be, true
(for example, does the dominance of irreducibly statistical laws in microphysics refute it?); (b) if it is
true, is it compatible, or incompatible, with human freedom? The thesis of ‘compatibilism’, variously
advanced by *Spinoza, *Hobbes, *Hume, *Kant, and Mill, argues that human freedom does not require
any violation of the causal order, and so is compatible with the truth of determinism. 2. In political
thought ‘determinism’ is normally used more narrowly, to denote the view that human choice is not
itself a main causal factor in the generation of social and political arrangements. Whether or not we
have free will, history is determined independently of its exercise, for example, by economic processes
which continue and develop however we choose to act on them.

2. Determinism is the philosophical notion not only that every event has a cause but also that every
event is the inevitable result of a causal chain that stretches backward in time to infinity. If true, this
would mean that there are no random, uncaused events. This notion is controversial enough when
applied to the natural world, where it quickly leads to some of the most complex (and unsettled)
debates in subatomic physics. But when the notion of determinism is applied to human events, it is
perhaps even more controversial, since its truth here would seem to imply that human beings are not in
control of their own destinies, because many have felt that determinism is incompatible with free will. In
social science, claims about determinism concern two matters: First, that every piece of human behavior
must be caused (which is problematic enough in some circles, since it would seem to imply that a
scientific study of human behavior is possible) and, second, that these causes originate outside the
person whose behavior we are studying, since each cause was itself presumably the result of some
earlier cause that led up to it. In tracing such a line of causation to its origin, we inevitably arrive at a
point before the person’s birth. And how can one be responsible for this? All the plans, passions,
decisions, and motivations of human life would therefore threaten to be mere epiphenomena; if we are
not the author of the events in our lives, but merely the mechanism through which the inevitable chain
of events determined before our birth plays itself out, then what is the point of human cognition or
accountability? Is the point of human life merely to feel that our actions are meaningful, even if we do
not in fact cause them? Debates about determinism in the social sciences thus quickly involve us in
questions about free will, predictability, and moral responsibility for our actions.
Empiricism

The thesis that all knowledge of matters of fact is based on, or derived from, experience, so that all
claims to knowledge of the world can be justified only by experience. Empiricism argues that a priori
knowledge either does not exist, or is confined to ‘analytical’ truths, which have no content, deriving
their validity merely from the meanings of the words used to express them; hence metaphysics, which
seeks to combine the a priori validity of logic with the contentful character of science, is impossible.
Principal empiricists have included many British philosophers (notably William of Ockham, Berkeley,
*Hume, and *J.S. Mill), and also the logical *positivists. The influence of empiricism on Anglo-Saxon
political thought has been very great, through what it affirms, through what it denies, and most of all
through what it refuses to attend to. The following ideas might (with varying degrees of plausibility) be
attributed to empiricist influence: (i) Experience is intelligible in isolation, or ‘atomistically’, without
reference to the nature of its object or to the circumstances of its subject. Thus it makes sense to
suggest that the object and the subject can be eliminated from all description of experience: in
particular there is no need to refer to the social conditions of an experience in order to describe its
content. (This seems to be implied by Hume’s theory of the relation between ‘idea’ and ‘impression’, as
well as by Russell’s ‘Logical Atomism’, and other related theories. (ii) The subject of experience is the
passive ‘recipient’ of data that are imprinted upon his intelligence irrespective of his activity, so that the
subject brings nothing to experience and gains everything from it. (But see *pragmatism, which in some
versions tries to combine empiricist ideas with the denial of (ii).) (iii) The individual is fulfilled when the
totality of his desires are fulfilled, so that there is no satisfaction of the whole of the human personality
over and above the satisfaction of its parts. (This thesis is sometimes thought to be an essential part of
*utilitarianism, at least of the kind defended by *Bentham.) (iv) The individual is the fundamental
component of, and in every important way more basic than, society: he is intelligible in isolation, and
social phenomena are to be understood only by reference to him and to others of his kind. (See
*individualism.) (v) ‘Reductionism’: specifically, the view that facts about society are ‘reducible’ to facts
about the individuals that compose it. This is contrasted with the position (variously espoused by
*idealists and by some *phenomenologists) that the individual is intelligible only when referred to the
social arrangement in which he is embedded (see (iv) above), so that any attempt to ‘reduce’ a society
to its individual members will involve a vicious circle. These and other theories all presuppose an
‘atomistic’ view of the world, of the relation between individual and society, and of the relation
between the individual and the state. In practice not all those ideas have been espoused together, so
that (iv) and (v), e.g., were rejected by Hume, who accepted (i) and (ii), while (iii) was accepted by Mill,
who expressed considerable doubt about (i) and (ii). Nevertheless, there does seem to be a general
tendency among philosophers who are empiricist in the strict sense given by (i) and (ii) to construe social
and political institutions in an individualistic way, as agglomerates of separately intelligible parts. This
has led political discussion to associate with the empiricist outlook a particular vision of the social world:
composite, sceptical, individualistic, and with no patience for *social facts. In the political sphere the
methodological opposite of this is *Hegel. In the scientific sphere, empiricism generates a characteristic
view of causation, which seems to be an almost inevitable consequence of its theory of knowledge. The
world consists of a set of contingently connected objects and states of affairs, united by regularities
rather than by necessities, and unrelated to any transcendental cause or destiny. Science investigates
matters of fact, through observation and the postulation of regular connections; the aim of science is
prediction, and judgments of *value have no place in it, being merely subjective preferences in the
investigator, which describe no objective states of affairs.

Historical Method

The question “what is history?” has been answered in different ways over the years. In the nineteenth
century, the emphasis was on collecting facts and then drawing conclusions from them. This was known
as the ‘empiricist tradition.’
According to the empiricist tradition, there are “certain basic facts which are the same for all historians
and form the backbone of history.” However, Carr says it is that which the historian, from his point of
view, considers important, and this is what separates it from ordinary facts of the past.Therefore, an
element of interpretation enters into every fact of history.The historian is necessarily selective. “The
belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the
historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.”

The historian starts with a provisional selection of facts, and a provisional interpretation in the light of
which that selection has been made – by others as well as himself. As he works, both the interpretation
and the selection and ordering of facts undergo subtle and perhaps partly unconscious changes through
the reciprocal action of one or the other. And this reciprocal action also involves reciprocity between
present and past, since the historian is part of the present and the facts belong to the past. The historian
and the facts of history are necessary to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless, the facts
without their historian are dead and meaningless.

Objectivity

Being objective is an attribute that can be related to truth, knowledge claims, and persons. Aiming at
objectivity is traditionally considered as a necessary condition of all science, but this is challenged by
relativists and social constructivists. The formulation of the ideal of objectivity by scientific realists
usually relies on assumptions that are typical to natural science, but it can be defended also in the case
of the social sciences. Let us briefly see what objectivity involves for the three items mentioned above:
(1) truth, (2) knowledge, and (3) persons. According to the realist theory of truth, a belief or statement is
true if its content corresponds to facts obtaining in reality. A modern explication of this correspondence
theory, or reality theory, of truth is given by Alfred Tarski’s semantic definition: Truths have to be
expressed in some interpreted language or conceptual system, but in the objective or absolute sense,
truth is not relative to person, gender, social class, culture, belief, theory, or paradigm. Knowledge,
classically defined as justified true belief, is objective if it is true in the absolute sense. Most scientific
realists are fallibilists, who acknowledge that all knowledge claims about matters of fact are corrigible by
further inquiry. Even though complete certainty cannot be reached, the most reliable way of finding
well-grounded knowledge is justification by publicly accessible scientific evidence. According to the
traditional ideal, a scientist should be an objective person: just, impartial, unbiased, not misled by
emotions, personal prejudices, or wishful thinking. Thus, science is objective in so far as its results
correspond to the real properties and law like relations of the research object, and in contrast, science is
subjective insofar as its results are influenced and biased by personal motives, values, wishes, beliefs,
and interests.

Subjectivity

Subjectivity is a central philosophical concept, related to consciousness, agency, personhood, reality,

and truth, which has been variously defined by sources. Three common definitions include that
subjectivity is the quality or condition of:
Something being a subject, narrowly meaning an individual who possesses conscious experiences, such
as perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires.

Something being a subject, broadly meaning an entity that has agency, meaning that it acts upon or
wields power over some other entity (an object).

Some information, idea, situation, or physical thing considered true only from the perspective of a
subject or subjects.

These various definitions of subjectivity are sometimes joined together in philosophy. The term is most
commonly used as an explanation for that which influences, informs, and biases people's judgments
about truth or reality; it is the collection of the perceptions, experiences, expectations, personal or
cultural understanding, and beliefs specific to a person. It is often used in contrast to the term
objectivity, which is described as a view of truth or reality which is free of any individual's influence.