Causality and Law in the Social World

Question 1

What is the democratic peace hypothesis? Who proposed it?

Answer 1

Dean Babst
–> there has never been a war between two non-democracies. This suggests that the existence of independent nations with elective governments greatly increases the chances for the maintenance of peace - a 0% correlation is very strong.

Question 2

The notion that there should be social scientific laws aligns with with which perspective? Who might disagree?

Answer 2

A naturalist might argue that the social sciences should have laws akin to the natural sciences - an interpretivist or otherwise anti-naturalist might disagree

Question 3

Natural laws must:

Answer 3

1. generality
2. support counterfactual
3. be exceptionless
   By this definition, the democratic peace hypothesis is a law.

Question 4

What is a true generalization?

Answer 4

One that makes no reference to objects, times, or places.

Question 5

What is the complexity argument about social scientific laws?

Answer 5

The complexity argument states that the unpredictable nature of human behaviour seems to contradict the possibility of social scientific laws because:
–> Where there is genuine law, there must be predictability
–> Human societies are more complex than natural phenomena, so there are not social scientific laws like there are natural laws.

Question 6

What is David Hume’s analysis of causality?

Answer 6

“an object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never would have existed”
Objects, meaning events.

This perspective presents causation as constant conjunction or perfectly correlated regularities - whenever X occurs, Y occurs.

Question 7

What is wrong with regularity views of causation? Describe both the metaphysical and epistemological problem?

Answer 7

Regularities are too easy to find
“suppose I have the habit of snapping my fingers. Then it would be true that whenever I snap my fingers on November 1 on an election year, someone is elected president on the 2nd”

Metaphysical - the theorist needs to specify that the overserved regularities are not the product of a common cause
Epistemological - Identifying a common cause is a deep challenge for any view of causation

Question 8

What are alternatives to regularity accounts of causation?

Answer 8

Thomas Reid and Woodward: X causes Y if and only if a person can bring about changes in Y by changing X
(but if causality depends on intervention, we can make no claims about history)

Capacity Account - where there is a genuine causal relationship, there is a correlation. Where there is no correlation, there is no causation.