The Logic of Historical Explanation in the Social Sciences

By James Mahoney, Erin B Kimball, Kendra L. Koivu. 2009

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Set Theory (2019, background): “Zadeh’s work sparked a revolution in computer technology (McNeill and Freiberger 1993) and fuzzy sets have also made their way into the social sciences (Smithson and Verkuilen 2006), including linguistics (Lakoff 1973), and many other areas.”
Comparative Hypothesis Testing Via Process Tracing (2014, background): “…of conditions or mechanisms, INUS causes (Insufficient, but Necessary elements of a conjunction that is Unnecessary, but Sufficient), explanations involving a fine-grained chain of intervening steps, sequencing, and so on (Mahoney 2000, 2010; Mahoney, Kimball, and Koivu 2009; Pierson 2004).”
Synchronous failure: the emerging causal architecture of global crisis (2015, background): “[4] Technically, this would be a representation of INUS causation, in which each cause is an insufficient but necessary member of a set of causes that is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the equifinal outcome of system overload (Mahoney 2008, Mahoney et al. 2009).”
Combining QCA and Process Tracing in Set-Theoretic Multi-Method Research (2013, background): “If complemented with a counterfactual, a single case suffices to examine the mechanisms underlying a set relation (Mahoney et al. 2009).”