How does Elster avoid the problem that if you have a toolbox of explanations that you can select from to explain anything, you actually aren’t explaining anything? In extracts from his works online, I didn’t see him considering the question of how to determine which explanation is actually true. It isn’t addressed in the Wikipedia article you cited (btw, you need to escape the parentheses in its title for the link to work). The Hedström and Ylikoski paper that it cites only suggests simulating a proposed mechanism and seeing if it generates the observed phenomenon.
Or more shortly, how are true stories to be distinguished from Just-So stories?
How does Elster avoid the problem that if you have a toolbox of explanations that you can select from to explain anything, you actually aren’t explaining anything?
On pages 16-20 of Explaining Social Behaviour: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Elster argues that one should refute rival explanations and show that additional (preferably novel) corollaries of the invoked explanation are observed. “These two criteria – refuting the most plausible alternatives and generating novel facts – are decisive for the credibility of an explanation.”
Sorry, I don’t remember his views of these important issues. I agree that there is a massive risk that the explanations you give using these proverbs will be Just so-stories. I seem to recall that Elster is quite positive to these proverbs—that they somehow express “folk wisdom”—but I think that one should be quite suspicious of them. They are very often used as facile just-so stories and semantic stopsigns (thanks, polymathwannabe, for the term) to comfort your own prejudices , even though they perhaps need not be (Elster uses lots of examples from French essayists as La Rouchefoucauld and Montaigne, who arguably used them in an unusually interesting and thought-provoking way).
How does Elster avoid the problem that if you have a toolbox of explanations that you can select from to explain anything, you actually aren’t explaining anything? In extracts from his works online, I didn’t see him considering the question of how to determine which explanation is actually true. It isn’t addressed in the Wikipedia article you cited (btw, you need to escape the parentheses in its title for the link to work). The Hedström and Ylikoski paper that it cites only suggests simulating a proposed mechanism and seeing if it generates the observed phenomenon.
Or more shortly, how are true stories to be distinguished from Just-So stories?
On pages 16-20 of Explaining Social Behaviour: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Elster argues that one should refute rival explanations and show that additional (preferably novel) corollaries of the invoked explanation are observed. “These two criteria – refuting the most plausible alternatives and generating novel facts – are decisive for the credibility of an explanation.”
Sorry, I don’t remember his views of these important issues. I agree that there is a massive risk that the explanations you give using these proverbs will be Just so-stories. I seem to recall that Elster is quite positive to these proverbs—that they somehow express “folk wisdom”—but I think that one should be quite suspicious of them. They are very often used as facile just-so stories and semantic stopsigns (thanks, polymathwannabe, for the term) to comfort your own prejudices , even though they perhaps need not be (Elster uses lots of examples from French essayists as La Rouchefoucauld and Montaigne, who arguably used them in an unusually interesting and thought-provoking way).