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Applying Evidential Pluralism to the social sciences

Shan, Yafeng and Williamson, Jon (2021) Applying Evidential Pluralism to the social sciences. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Evidential Pluralism maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one normally needs to establish the existence of an appropriate conditional correlation and the existence of an appropriate mechanism complex, so when assessing a causal claim one ought to consider both association studies and mechanistic studies. Hitherto, Evidential Pluralism has been applied to medicine, leading to the EBM+ programme, which recommends that evidence-based medicine should systematically evaluate mechanistic studies alongside clinical studies. This paper argues that Evidential Pluralism can also be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. In particular, Evidential Pluralism provides (i) a new approach to evidence-based policy; (ii) a new account of the evidential relationships in more theoretical research; and (iii) new philosophical motivation of mixed methods research. The application of Evidential Pluralism to the social sciences is also defended against two objections.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Shan, Yafengy.shan@kent.ac.uk0000-0001-7736-1822
Williamson, Jonj.williamson@kent.ac.uk0000-0003-0514-4209
Keywords: Evidential Pluralism; Russo-Williamson Thesis; Evidence-based policy; Mixed methods research; Social science methodology; Causality; Causation
Subjects: General Issues > Causation
General Issues > Evidence
Specific Sciences > Sociology
Depositing User: Dr Yafeng Shan
Date Deposited: 13 Sep 2021 21:43
Last Modified: 13 Sep 2021 21:43
Item ID: 19565
Journal or Publication Title: European Journal for Philosophy of Science
Publisher: Springer
DOI or Unique Handle: 10.1007/s13194-021-00415-z
Subjects: General Issues > Causation
General Issues > Evidence
Specific Sciences > Sociology
Date: 2021
ISSN: 1879-4912
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/19565

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