Friedel Weinert - Social mechanisms and social causation

jpe:10665 - Journal of Philosophical Economics, November 19, 2014, Volume VIII Issue 1 - https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10665
Social mechanisms and social causationArticle

Authors: Friedel Weinert 1

The aim of this paper is to examine the notion of social mechanisms by comparison with the notions of evolutionary and physical mechanisms. It is argued that social mechanisms are based on trends, and not lawlike regularities, so that social mechanisms are different from mechanisms in the natural sciences. Taking as an example of social causation the abolition of the slave trade, this paper argues that social mechanisms should be incorporated in Weber's wider notion of adequate causation in order to achieve their explanatory purpose.

https://doi.org/10.46298/jpe.10665
Source: HAL:hal-03710464v1
Volume: Volume VIII Issue 1
Section: Articles
Published on: November 19, 2014
Imported on: December 28, 2022
Keywords: ideal types,mechanisms (evolutionary,physical,social),natural selection,rainbows,regularities,slave trade,social causation,trends,Weber,[SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences
Licence: Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Classifications

JEL Classification System1
  • D00 - Microeconomics: General
  • Z00 - Other Special Topics: General
Sources:
  • [1] OpenAIRE Graph.

Share and export

Consultation statistics

This page has been seen 234 times.
This article's PDF has been downloaded 229 times.