Evidential pluralists, like Federica Russo and Jon Williamson, argue that causal claims should be corroborated by establishing both the existence of a suitable correlation and a suitable mechanism complex. At first glance, this fits well with mixed method research in the social sciences, which often involves a pluralist combination of statistical and mechanistic evidence. However, statistical evidence concerns a population of cases, while mechanistic evidence is found in individual case studies. How should researchers combine such general statistical evidence and specific (...) mechanistic evidence? This article discusses a very recent answer to this question, ‘multi-method large-N qualitative analysis’ or multi-method LNQA, popular in political science and international relations studies of rare events like democratic transitions and cease-fire agreements. Multi-method LNQA combines a comprehensive study of all relevant event cases with statistical analysis, in an attempt to solve the issues of generalization faced by other types of qualitative research, such as selection bias and lack of representativeness. I will argue that the kind of general causal claim that multi-method LNQA is after, however, is crucially different from the average treatment effect found in statistical analysis and can in fact only be supported with mechanistic evidence. I conclude from this that mixed method research, and thereby evidential pluralism, may be inappropriate in this context. (shrink)

Evidential pluralism has been used to justify mixed-method research in political science. The combination of methodologies within case study analysis, however, has not received as much attention. This article applies the theory of evidential pluralism to causal inference in the case study method process tracing. I argue that different methodologies for process tracing commit to distinct fundamental theories of causation. I show that, problematically, one methodology may not recognize as genuine knowledge the fundamental claims of the other. By evaluating the (...) epistemic reliability of these fundamental claims, we can find a way out of such conflicts and rescue pluralism. (shrink)

Critiques of case studies as an epistemic genre usually focus on the domain of justification and hinge on comparisons with statistics and laboratory experiments. In this domain, case studies can be defended by the notion of “infirming”: they use many different bits of evidence, each of which may independently “infirm” the account. Yet their efficacy may be more powerful in the domain of discovery, in which these same different bits of evi- dence must be fully integrated to create an explanatory (...) account with internal validity. (shrink)

The Russo Williamson thesis (RWT) states that a causal claim can be established only if it can be established that there is a difference-making relationship between the cause and the effect, and that there is a mechanism linking the cause and the effect that is responsible for such a difference-making relationship (Russo & Williamson, 2007). The applicability of Russo and Williamson’s idea was hugely debated in relation to biomedical research, and recently it has been applied to the social sciences (Shan (...) & Williamson, 2021). While many philosophers and social scientists have advocated the use of different kinds of evidence for causal discoveries, others have criticised this approach. With this paper, I aim to defend RWT from criticisms and to show its importance in the social sciences. The paper is structured as follows. After a brief introduction, in Sect. 2, I will summarise RWT, and in Sect. 3 I will describe how this approach can be applied to the social sciences. In Sect. 4, I will reconstruct two main criticisms of this thesis proposed in the philosophy of the social sciences literature: namely (i) RWT is not used in the social sciences, (ii) RWT does not work. For each criticism I will provide a defence of RWT. My defence will be based on two general considerations: (i) RWT appears perfectly in line with the research methods used in the social sciences and (ii) RWT can be applied successfully to establish causal claims. In Sect. 5, moreover, I will examine the causal accounts that have motivated such criticisms and I will argue that they should be rejected to endorse RWT and a causal account able to accommodate the current use of mechanistic and difference-making evidence in the social sciences. Section 6 will conclude with a note on the relevance of RWT in both its descriptive and normative form. (shrink)

Case study research was once the primary methodology of research in political science. The shift to other methodologies in recent decades suggests has led to a devaluing of these approaches. This article explores six roles for case studies in the social sciences and argues that an understanding of the multiple aims of research supports a methodological pluralism that includes case study research.

Complex environmental problems require well-researched policies that integrate knowledge from both the natural and social sciences. Epistemic differences can impede interdisciplinary collaboration, as shown by debates between conservation biologists and anthropologists who are working to preserve biological diversity and support economic development in central Africa. Disciplinary differences with regard to 1) facts, 2) rigor, 3) causal explanation, and 4) research goals reinforce each other, such that early decisions about how to define concepts or which methods to adopt may tilt research (...) design and data interpretation toward one discipline’s epistemological framework. If one of the contributing fields imposes a solution to an epistemic problem, this sets the stage for what I call disciplinary capture. Avoiding disciplinary capture requires clear communication between collaborators, but beyond this it also requires that collaborators craft research questions and innovate research designs which are different from the inherited epistemological frameworks of contributing disciplines. (shrink)

At the interface of developmental biology and evolutionary biology, the very criteria of scientific knowledge are up for grabs. A central issue is the status of evolutionary genetics models, which some argue cannot coherently be used with complex gene regulatory network (GRN) models to explain the same evolutionary phenomena. Despite those claims, many researchers use evolutionary genetics models jointly with GRN models to study evolutionary phenomena. This dissertation compares two recent research projects in which researchers jointly use the two kinds (...) of models. I use methods from the empirical social sciences, such as digital corpus analysis, content analysis, and structured case analysis. I infer three primary conclusions about projects of the kind studied. First, they employ an implicit concept of gene that enables the joint use of both kinds of models. Second, they pursue more epistemic aims besides mechanistic explanation of phenomena. Third, they don’t work to create and export broad synthesized theories. Rather, they focus on phenomena too complex to be understood by a common general theory, they distinguish parts of the phenomena, and they apply models from different theories to the different parts. For such projects, seemingly incompatible models are synthesized largely through mediated representations of complex phenomena. (shrink)