Chance and Causality
A Comment on Manis and Meltzer
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2517596 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Levi Martins (0000-0002-4211-1791, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1995 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 197 |
| Publication date | 1995-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociological Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0735-2751 • E-ISSN: 1467-9558 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/202161 |
| OpenAlex | W2048796275 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 5 |
I welcome the attention to the importance of in sociological theory in the recent paper by Jerome Manis and Bernard Meltzer (1994), and their attempt to sketch alternatives to the causal determinism assumed by many sociologists, but I believe that they have not correctly specified the challenges and possibilities in sociological explanation. Manis and Meltzer argue that there exists a class of events which possess the following overlapping features: 1) absence of cause, 2) absence of predictability, and 3) absence of regularity in the sequence of the action and its antecedent conditions, and that the existence of such events contravenes determinism, a fundamental postulate of science (p. 45). They maintain that although some events are governed by causal laws, others are not (p. 47), and argue that this latter set includes chaos in the mathematical sense, quantum mechanics, evolution, trends in the arts, global politics and political movements, people's actions, and many key points in their lives, such as where they work and whom they mate with. The authors conclude that mainstream sociology and its search for causal laws cannot help us study events in this broad set. This claim is especially significant because the broad set includes human action. Indeed, although Manis and Meltzer may concede that some events in the universe are causally determined, to exclude human action from that set implies a radical reorientation of sociological explanation. They use the word chance, however, to denote things that analytically are radically different; therefore much of the chance in human affairs that they discuss has no direct relation to the question of ontological determinism. They accept a false antinomy between external determination and unexplainable chance, and although they are right to question the appropriateness of the former for sociology, they are wrong in their understanding of the latter. Closer attention to the concepts of and cause, and to their examples, may allow a solution to this problem. The error of much of sociology's taken-for-granted explanatory apparatus is due to the particular methodological assumptions with which sociology grew up, not to ontological determinism versus indeterminism
Economics · Epistemology · Positive economics · Sociology · Economic Theory and Institutions · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2014 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |