Evidential Pluralism in the Social Sciences

Yafeng Shan · Jon Williamson

Apr 2023 · Taylor & Francis

About this ebook

This volume contends that Evidential Pluralism—an account of the epistemology of causation, which maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one needs to establish the existence of a correlation and the existence of a mechanism—can be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. Through case studies in sociology, economics, political science and law, it advances new philosophical foundations for causal enquiry in the social sciences. The book provides an account of how to establish and evaluate causal claims and it offers a new way of thinking about evidence-based policy, basic social science research and mixed methods research. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social science research and methodology, the philosophy of science and evidence-based policy.

About the author

Yafeng Shan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is the author of Doing Integrated History and Philosophy of Science: A Case Study of the Origin of Genetics and the editor of New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress.

Jon Williamson is Professor of Reasoning, Inference, and Scientific Method at the University of Kent, UK. His books include Evaluating Evidence of Mechanisms in Medicine, Lectures on Inductive Logic, Probabilistic Logics and Probabilistic Networks, In Defence of Objective Bayesianism and Bayesian Nets and Causality.