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The author clarifies the motivation behind his original paper 'Social Mechanisms, Causal Inference and the Policy Relevance of Social Science'. He demonstrates that his original paper does not make the mistake or fallacy that Daniel Steel thinks he has committed in his comment on it.

The article seeks to examine the necessity of social mechanisms in establishing the policy relevance of casual claims.

Some comments on the article 'Cultural Evolution, Reductionism in the Social Sciences and Explanatory Pluralism' written by Jean Lachapelle are discussed. His positive and negative aims that are used to defend explanatory pluralism are described.

In the current literature on scientific explanation unification became unfashionable in favour of causal approaches. We want to bring unification back into the picture. In this paper we demonstrate that resemblance questions do occur in scientific practice and that they cannot be properly answered without unification. Our examples show that resemblance questions about particular facts demand what we call causal network unification, while resemblance questions about regularities require what we call mechanism unification. We clarify how these types of unification relate to Philip Kitcher's account, but also to causal and mechanistic accounts of explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on J. Lachapelle's article on cultural evolution and reductionism in social sciences. Dual inheritance model; Evolutionary active nature of cultural evolution; Explanatory pluralism.