Causal Claims and Causal Explanation in International Studies

Many discussions of causation, especially those in the social sciences, are hampered by their reliance on an impoverished conception where the necessary and essential mark of a causal connection is systematic cross-case covariation. This leads to an observational understanding of causation as connected to general patterns, as well as a thorough-going conflation of causal claims and causal explanations. If we think of a causal explanation as a response to a specific kind of practical problem-situation in which the task is how to accomplish something and we shift to a manipulationist understanding of causation, many things become clearer. In particular, we see that the various efforts to conduct real-world open-system evaluations of casual claims are often misguided, inasmuch as such evaluations are often mistaken for causal explanations of observed outcomes.