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Record W1986406803 · doi:10.1177/0539018410378284

Explanations without causes and causes without reasons

2010· article· en· W1986406803 on OpenAlexaff
Hudson Meadwell

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial Science Information · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicQualitative Comparative Analysis Research
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCausationMetaphysicsEpistemologyAction (physics)Agency (philosophy)PhysicalismNothingSociologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Action is a central category in the social sciences. It is also commonplace to assume that the social world has a causal structure. Yet standard ways of specifying causal relations in social science lack explanatory force when the subject matter is intentional action. The present article considers this problem. The metaphysics of action are distinguished from the metaphysics of intentional action, and it is argued that the former forces an implausible unity on the actions of inanimate nature and of rational agents. Agency in the metaphysics of action adds nothing to state-variable causation. Agency in the metaphysics of intentional action, in contrast, is argued to have a different structure, not reducible to state-variable causation. Work on endogenous choice in social science suggests that the concept of agency that is on view in literature on selection effects and social generation implies the metaphysics of intentional action. Recent research in the philosophy of action is considered in order to specify the structure of intentional action and the force of intentional explanations.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.020
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.011
Threshold uncertainty score0.051

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.020
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0030.022
Scholarly communication0.0040.016
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0040.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0110.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.074
GPT teacher head0.462
Teacher spread0.388 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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