Check your truth conditions! Clarifying the relationship between theories of causation and social science methods for causal inference

Theories of causation in philosophy ask what makes causal claims true and establish so called truth conditions allowing one to separate causal from non-causal relationships. We argue that social scientists should be aware of truth conditions of causal claims because they imply which method of causal inference can establish whether a specific claim holds true. A survey of social scientists shows that this is worth emphasizing because many respondents have unclear concepts of causation and link methods to philosophical criteria in an incoherent way. We link five major theories of causation to major small and large-n methods of causal inference to provide clear guidelines to researchers and improve dialogue across methods. While most theories can be linked to more than one method, we argue that structural counterfactual theories are most useful for the social sciences since they require neither social and natural laws nor physical processes to assess causal claims.

哲学中的因果理论探究何种因素使得因果断言成立，并确立所谓的真理条件，以便区分因果与非因果关系。我们认为，社会科学家应关注因果断言的真理条件，因为这些条件暗示了何种因果推断方法可以验证特定断言的真实性。一项针对社会科学家的调查表明，这一点值得强调，因为许多受访者对因果概念的理解模糊，且以不连贯的方式将方法与哲学标准相联系。我们将五种主要的因果理论与大样本和小样本的因果推断主要方法相联系，为研究人员提供清晰的指导，并促进跨方法对话的深入。尽管大多数理论可以与多种方法相联系，但我们认为，结构反事实理论对于社会科学最为有用，因为它评估因果断言时既不依赖于社会与自然法则，也不依赖于物理过程。