Project leader:
Prof. Dr. Oliver Scholz (Münster)
PhD student:
Daniel Plenge, M.A. (Münster)
Project 8 (Phase 2): Explanation, Laws, Mechanisms and Microfoundations in the Social Sciences
While social mechanisms arguably play a central role in recent social theory and social research many scholars start to believe that the recent debate over social mechanisms and accompanied theories of mechanismic explanation has become somewhat sterile. One indicator for this might be the charge of „mechanism talk“ and „mechanism industries“ that is to be found in recent social scientific literature. A second indicator is the development of different mechanism schools which seem to share nothing more than the use of the term „mechanism“. The primary reason for this development might be that problems about social mechanisms and mechanismic social explanation come in a bundle and that this bundle is filled with philosophy. There are problems concerning the furniture of the social world, issues about social causation, macro-micro-links, structure and agency, social emergence and social laws. Last but not least, there are theoretical differences about the explananda of sociological explanation and the methodologies that might have the potential to make “social phenomena” understandable to some sufficient degree, for example, by way of „micro foundation“.
The aim of the project is to separate and clarify some of the issues that come together in different approaches to social mechanisms and to confront the existing philosophical approaches with those approaches in social theory and social research – and vice versa. In order to get a clearer picture of social mechanisms and mechanismic social explanation, we plan to tackle those issues in cooperation with sociologists. Another major question is the following: Is the re-emergence of philosophy (ontology) in social theory necessary and potentially fruitful or not?
For more details about the issues involved and some results, see:
Marie I. Kaiser/Daniel Plenge: Introduction: Points of Contact Between Biology and History, in Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge, Andreas Hüttemann (eds.): Explanation in the Special Sciences. The Case of Biology and History, Dordrecht 2014, 1-23.
Daniel Plenge: Do Historians Study the Mechanisms of History? A Sketch, in Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge, Andreas Hüttemann (eds.): Explanation in the Special Sciences. The Case of Biology and History, Dordrecht 2014, 211-243.
Daniel Plenge: Realist Turn? Neuere Literatur zur Philosophie der Geschichte und der Geschichtswissenschaft. Teil 2: Erklärung der Geschichte, in: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 68 (2014), 545-568.
Oliver R. Scholz: Verstehen = Zusammenhänge erkennen, in: Sachs-Hombach, Klaus (Hrsg.): Verstehen und Verständigung, Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag i.Dr.
Oliver R. Scholz: Hermeneutics; in: Wright, James D. (Hrsg.): The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd Edition, Kidlington, Oxford: Elsevier Ltd. i.Dr.
Work in progress:
Rainer Greshoff/Daniel Plenge: Soziale Mechanismen: Grundlagen der Soziologie oder bloße Metaphysik?
Daniel Plenge: Untersuchen Soziologen die Mechanismen der Geschichte?
Daniel Plenge: Realist Turn? Teil 3: Ontologie der Geschichts- und Sozialwissenschaften?
Project 8 (Phase 1): Explanations, Causation and Laws in historical science
Explanation has not been a primary object of research in philosophy of history in the last decades and debates about causation and the relevance of laws to explanatory practices in “history” (historiography, historical science, historical social science, historical sociology etc.) have already terminated in the 1980s. Even more, many philosophers of history seem to be convinced that historians are not to be grouped among scientists, that they do not explain or understand anything in some way similar to “science”, and that historians are neither much interested in causal relations nor in any regularities.
The project starts from the (fallible) assumption that history is by and large a scientific and not a purely literary enterprise which aims at explanation and understanding. The second assumption is that almost any issue in philosophy of history can only be tackled by starting from what working historians do. The following questions rank among those to be investigated: What do historians do? What is historical science (or historiography)? What is it that scientific historians wish to understand? Which are typical problems that historians face in trying to understand whatever they wish to understand? Are there causal explanations in history? How does causation work in ontic histories and what is a history in the first place? What is the role of action explanations in explanations of historical events and social change? Are there mechanisms of history and do historians explain by unpacking those mechanisms? Do historians typically write narratives or do they subsume historical events under laws? Is a metaphysics of history possible and needed?
For more details about the issues at hand and first result, see:
Oliver R. Scholz: Philosophy of History – Metaphysics and Epistemology, in: Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge, Andreas Hüttemann (eds.): Explanation in the Special Sciences. The Case of Biology and History, Dordrecht 2014, 245-253.
Oliver R. Scholz: Die individuelle Wirklichkeit und die Pluralität wissenschaftlicher Methoden. Anmerkungen zur frühen Debatte über Heinrich Rickerts Logik historischer Begriffsbildung, in: Christian Krijnen/Marc de Launay (eds.): Der Begriff der Geschichte im Marburger und südwestdeutschen Neukantianismus, Würzburg 2013, 69-85.
Oliver R. Scholz: Texte interpretieren – Daten, Hypothesen und Methoden, in: Borkowski, Jan/Descher, Stefan/Ferder, Felicitas/Heine, Philipp David (Hrsg.): Literatur interpretieren: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu Theorie und Praxis, Münster: Mentis 2015, S. 147-171.
Daniel Plenge: Do Historians Study the Mechanisms of History? A Sketch, in: Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge, Andreas Hüttemann (eds.): Explanation in the Special Sciences. The Case of Biology and History, Dordrecht 2014, 211-243.
Daniel Plenge: Realist Turn? Neuere Literatur zur Philosophie der Geschichte und der Geschichtswissenschaft. Teil 1: Erkenntnis der Geschichte, in: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 68 (2014), 400-422.
Daniel Plenge: Realist Turn? Neuere Literatur zur Philosophie der Geschichte und der Geschichtswissenschaft. Teil 2: Erklärung der Geschichte, in: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 68 (2014), 545-568.
Work in progress:
Daniel Plenge: Geschichtswissenschaften. Eine Klärungsskizze (Dissertation).
Oliver R. Scholz: Heinrich Rickert und Max Weber: Von der Logik der historischen Wissenschaften zur Wissenschaftslehre der Soziologie; in: Wagner, Gerhard/Härpfer, Claudius (Hrsg.): Max Webers vergessene Zeitgenossen: Beiträge zur Genese der Wissenschaftslehre, Köln: Harassowitz i.Vorb.