OnticĪccounts differ quite radically in their ontologies, and one of the latest additions to this tradition proposed by Peter Machamer, Moreover, even if the possibility is rarely realized in that way, it raises, simply as a possibility, a conceptual problem with Elster’s mechanistic framework.Īccounts of ontic explanation have often been devised so as to provide an understanding of mechanism and of causation. If this possibility is realized in social science settings, as I argue it might well be, Elster’s mechanistic account is threatened. We might then find ourselves in the paradoxical position of knowing more relevant causal truths about the phenomenon we are interested in than we did before, but being able to explain less.
As our causal knowledge of a specific problem grows we might come to know too much to make use of an Elsterian mechanism but still lack a law. However, his mechanisms suffer from a characteristic problem that I will explore in this article. Elster develops an interesting substitute: a special kind of mechanism designed to fill the explanatory gap between laws and mere description. His main concern is that they have so few well-established laws. Jon Elster worries about the explanatory power of the social sciences.
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