3,674 research outputs found
Micro, Macro, and Mechanisms
This article, which takes a fresh look at micro–macro relations in the social sciences from the point of view of the mechanistic account of explanation, introduces the distinction between causal and constitutive explanation. It then discusses the intentional fundamentalism, and challenges the idea that intentional explanations have a privileged position in the social sciences. A mechanism-based explanation describes the causal process selectively. The properties of social networks serve both as the explananda and the explanantia in sociology. Knowledge of the causal mechanisms is vital in the justification of historical causal claims. The intentional attitudes of individuals are also important in most mechanism-based explanations of social phenomena. It is important to pay closer attention to how real macro social facts figure in social scientific theories and explanations.Peer reviewe
Review of Individuals and Identity in Economics by John B. Davis
Book review. Reviewed work: Individuals and Identity in Economics / John B. Davis. - Cambridge University Press, 2011.Non peer reviewe
Generative Explanation and Individualism in Agent-Based Simulation
Social scientists associate agent-based simulation (ABS) models with three ideas about explanation: they provide generative explanations, they are models of mechanisms, and they implement methodological individualism. In light of a philosophical account of explanation, we show that these ideas are not necessarily related and offer an account of the explanatory import of ABS models. We also argue that their bottom-up research strategy should be distinguished from methodological individualism.Peer reviewe
Explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries
Many of the arguments for neuroeconomics rely on mistaken assumptions about criteria of explanatory relevance across disciplinary boundaries and fail to distinguish between evidential and explanatory relevance. Building on recent philosophical work on mechanistic research programmes and the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation, we argue that explaining an explanatory presupposition or providing a lower-level explanation does not necessarily constitute explanatory improvement. Neuroscientific findings have explanatory relevance only when they inform a causal and explanatory account of the psychology of human decision-making.Peer reviewe
A thermodynamical fiber bundle model for the fracture of disordered materials
We investigate a disordered version of a thermodynamic fiber bundle model
proposed by Selinger, Wang, Gelbart, and Ben-Shaul a few years ago. For simple
forms of disorder, the model is analytically tractable and displays some new
features. At either constant stress or constant strain, there is a non
monotonic increase of the fraction of broken fibers as a function of
temperature. Moreover, the same values of some macroscopic quantities as stress
and strain may correspond to different microscopic cofigurations, which can be
essential for determining the thermal activation time of the fracture. We argue
that different microscopic states may be characterized by an experimentally
accessible analog of the Edwards-Anderson parameter. At zero temperature, we
recover the behavior of the irreversible fiber bundle model.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure
Interaction-induced current-reversals in driven lattices
We demonstrate that long-range interactions can cause, as time evolves,
consecutive reversals of directed currents for dilute ensembles of particles in
driven lattices. These current-reversals are based on a general mechanism which
leads to an interaction-induced accumulation of particles in the regular
regions of the underlying single-particle phase space and to a synchronized
single-particle motion as well as an enhanced efficiency of Hamiltonian
ratchets.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
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