Explanation: general

The main task of the social sciences is to explain social phenomena. It is not the only task, but it is the most important one, to which others are subordinated or on which they depend. The basic type of explanandum is an event. To explain it is to give an account of why it happened, by citing an earlier event as its cause. Thus we may explain Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 presidential elections by Jimmy Carter's failed attempt to rescue the Americans held hostage in Iran. Or we might explain the outbreak of World War II by citing any number of earlier events, from the Munich agreement to the signing of the Versailles Treaty. Even though in both cases the fine structure of the causal explanation will obviously be more complex, they do embody the basic event-event pattern of explanation. In a tradition originating with David Hume, it is often referred to as the “billiard-ball” model of causal explanation. One event, ball A hitting ball B, is the cause of – and thus explains – another event, namely, ball B's beginning to move.

Those who are familiar with the typical kind of explanation in the social sciences may not recognize this pattern, or not see it as privileged. In one way or another, social scientists tend to put more emphasis on facts, or states of affairs, than on events. The sentence “At 9 a.m. the road was slippery” states a fact. The sentence “At 9 a.m. the car went off the road” states an event. As this example suggests, one might offer a fact-event explanation to account for a car accident. Conversely, one might propose an event-fact explanation to account for a given state of affairs, as when asserting that the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 explains the pervasive state of fear of many Americans. Finally, standard social-science explanations often have a fact-fact pattern. To take an example at random, it has been claimed that the level of education of women explains per capita income in the developing world.