What Do Social Scientists Do?

Abstract

This chapter investigates whether Salmon's account of causality in terms of physical processes and interactions makes justice of the type of causal claims made in social contexts. Based on some paradigmatic case studies from the social sciences (e.g. demography, epidemiology, or econometrics), it is argued that social scientists (i) use statistical causality to detect causal relations, (ii) state causal claims in causal contexts, (iii) look for specific variations to test, and (iv) model causal mechanisms by means of statistical tools.