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The idea that mechanisms are crucially important to differentiate between genuine and spurious causal relations is ubiquitous both in the philosophical and in the social scientific literature. Yet philosophers of the social sciences have seldom attempted to spell out systematically the way in which mechanistic reasoning or evidence are concretely used to deal with spurious association and the problem of confounders in the social sciences. In this paper, we analyze two recent such accounts, proposed by Harold Kincaid and Daniel Steel. We show how these two accounts radically differ in their notion of mechanism (a process account, and a complex system account, respectively), and how this ultimately impacts in the way in which they understand the inferential role of mechanisms in the social sciences. We then confront both accounts with the details of a well-known controversy around the purportedly causal association between the legalization of abortion and the subsequent fall in criminality in the United States. We show the limitations of both accounts in representing accurately the role of mechanistic evidence and hypotheses in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on multisited ethnographic case studies, this paper seeks to contrastively compare the demonstration and articulation formats of two social science expert cultures-- economics and anthropology--enrolled 'in the wild' of transnational environmental politics. How, the paper asks, do different social sciences come to be configured within, and do performative work upon, heterogeneous assemblages of global natures? In the first case US economists translate carbon markets into a world of Indian ecoprofessionals, across serious North-South conflicts in climate politics. In the second case a group of anthropologists, mobilized by Japanese bureaucratic elites, deploy their methods to assemble whaling cultures, as part of global biodiversity conflicts. Whereas the first case builds on existing arguments on the 'performativity of economics' (Callón), the second case expands this agenda, noting how the noneconomic social sciences (eg, anthropology) may also be consequential in enacting particular nature-cultures. Theoretically, the paper situates these inquiries at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and political anthropology, in addressing the question--important to environmental expertise and politics--of how 'local' (particular) and 'global' (universal) claims are linked in efficacious ways in 'other-than-Western' contexts? Here, the argument will be that, despite their differences, economic and anthropological performances of global natures share certain formal (aesthetic) similarities, related to credible expert demonstrations in transnational environmental contexts. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this claim for STS self-reflection on its politics of methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]