Social causation and biographical research: philosophical, theoretical and methodological arguments: by Giorgos Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou, Abingdon, Routledge, 2020, 119pp., £38.28 (hardback), ISBN 978-0367620363.

Giorgos Tsiolis and Michalis Christodoulou have written a deeply theoretical book arguing that we should see reconstructive biographical research as a method for constructing causal accounts of social lives and generalizing beyond the particular cases under study. As I have argued elsewhere, Sawyer's approach is incompatible with the sort of relational approach to emergence that is called for by a critical realist ontology (Elder-Vass [3]). Tsiolis and Christodoulou are tempted by Keith Sawyer's argument that the argument from wildly disjunctive multiple realizability can be transferred to the social realm (Sawyer [4]; Sawyer [5]; Sawyer [6]; Sawyer [7]). [Extracted from the article]