History and Theory 47 (May 2008), 168-182 © Wesleyan University 2008 ISSN: 0018-2656

A pragmatist defense of non-relativistic explanatory

pluralism in history and social science

Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber

Abstract

Explanatory pluralism has been defended by several philosophers of history and social sci-
ence, recently, for example, by Tor Egil Førland in this journal. In this article, we provide
a better argument for explanatory pluralism, based on the pragmatist idea of epistemic
interests. Second, we show that there are three quite different senses in which one can be
an explanatory pluralist: one can be a pluralist about questions, a pluralist about answers
to questions, and a pluralist about both. We defend the last position. Finally, our third aim
is to argue that pluralism should not be equated with “anything goes”: we will argue for
non-relativistic explanatory pluralism. This pluralism will be illustrated by examples from
history and social science in which different forms of explanation (for example, structural,
functional, and intentional explanations) are discussed, and the fruitfulness of our frame-
work for understanding explanatory pluralism is shown.

i. Introduction

Explanatory pluralists subscribe to the following two theses:

(1) There are no general exclusion rules with respect to explanations in history
and social science; it is, for instance, impossible to rule out intentional explana-
tion or functional explanations.
(2) There are no general preference rules with respect to explanations in history
and social science; it is, for instance, unwarranted to claim that intentional expla-
nations are always better than macro-explanations.

In order to clarify the difference between (1) and (2) it is useful to point out that
one can accept (1) and reject (2). For instance, one could reject (2) by claiming
that functional explanations are inferior to other types of explanation (and thus are
superfluous as soon as we have another type of explanation), while also accept-
ing (1) by claiming that sometimes functional explanations are all we have (and,
therefore, they should not be completely excluded). Since accepting (1) while re-
jecting (2) is possible, and not vice versa, claim (2) is a stronger claim than (1).
In his recent paper on explanatory pluralism in this journal, Tor Egil Førland
has shown that Peter Railton’s concept of an ideal explanatory text is pluralistic:

. Jeroen Van Bouwel is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Fund (FWO), Flanders (Belgium).
The authors would like to thank Brian Fay and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an
earlier version of this paper.
 a pragmatist defense of explanatory pluralism 169
“Its central concept of an ideal explanatory text provides a framework for histo-
riographical explanation that is dynamic in that it invites the historian to search
for ever more explanatory information. It is also pluralistic, encompassing both
causal (including intentional), structural, and functional explanations.” Førland’s
paper also contains a lot of examples that show that at least some historians and
social scientists are pluralists. However, this does not suffice to justify the subtitle
of Førland’s paper: “A Plea for Ecumenism.” Not all social scientists and histo-
rians are explanatory pluralists, so even if in principle we would accept a natu-
ralistic argument (“all social scientists are pluralists, so pluralism is justified”) as
valid, the argument is not convincing because its premise is wrong. The first aim
of this paper is to provide a better argument for explanatory pluralism. As our title
suggests, our argument will be that of a pragmatist: we start from assumptions
about the aims of inquiry in history and the social sciences. Our line of reasoning
is based on the typically pragmatist idea of epistemic interests.
Our second aim is to show that there are three quite different senses in which
one can be an explanatory pluralist: one can be a pluralist about questions, a plu-
ralist about answers to questions, and a pluralist about both. We will defend the
last position.
Finally, our third aim is to argue that pluralism should not be equated with
“anything goes”: we will argue for a non-relativistic pluralism.
The structure of this paper is as follows. We will present in section II a phil-
osophical framework for discussing social explanations, introducing the crucial
distinction between explanations of (social) facts and explanations of contrasts
between (social) facts. In sections III and IV, we will elaborate examples that allow
us to argue for explanatory pluralism, our first aim. In sections V to VII, we will
discuss the two senses in which one can be a pluralist, fulfilling our second aim.
Section VIII deals with our last aim, that is, the argument against relativism.

II. A philosophical framework for discussing social explanations

Dealing with the plurality of explanations we encounter in history and the social
sciences, we need some philosophical instruments to make the explananda as
explicit as possible, and to reveal their underlying epistemic interests, in order to
evaluate competing explanations. The erotetic model of explanation, which has
its roots in the work of Bas van Fraassen, seems a good candidate to help us; it
regards explanations as answers to why-questions. It can be used to show how
different questions about one social fact can lead to the use of different forms of
explanation. We will employ this model to elaborate a framework for explana-

. Tor Egil Førland, “The Ideal Explanatory Text in History: A Plea for Ecumenism,” History and
Theory 43 (2004), 323.
. See chapter 5 of his The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). For more on the
erotetic model, see, for example, Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation: Rethinking the Questions
in Social Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Harold Kincaid, Individualism and
the Unity of Science (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997); and Mark Risjord,
Woodcutters and Witchcraft: Rationality and Interpretive Change in the Social Sciences (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2000).
. In earlier articles we illustrated how different questions lead to the use of different forms of
170 Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber

tions that will help us to grasp the plurality of explanations and identify the limits
of this plurality.
Different explanatory requests can be distinguished in social-scientific and his-
torical practice. We distinguish at least four types of explanatory questions. We do
not consider the explanatory requests and motivations mentioned here as the only
possible ones, but we do believe they are omnipresent in social science practice.
(A) (plain fact) Why does object a have property P?
(B) (P-contrast) Why does object a have property P, rather than the (ideal)
property P′?
(C) (O-contrast) Why does object a have property P, while object b has property
P′?
(D) (T-contrast) Why does object a have property P at time t, but property P′
at time t′?

First, non-contrastive, explanation-seeking questions concern plain facts, for ex-

ample, of the form: Why does object a have property P? These non-contrastive
questions can have different motivations. One possible motivation is sheer intel-
lectual curiosity (the desire to know how the fact “fits into the causal structure of
the world,” to know how the fact was produced from given antecedents via spatio-
temporally continuous processes). A more pragmatic motivation is the desire to
have information that enables us to predict whether and in which circumstances
similar events will occur in the future (or the anticipation of actions of persons/
groups). Another possible motivation concerns causally connecting object a hav-
ing property P to events with which we are more familiar.
Explanations of plain facts (answers to non-contrastive questions) have to show
how the observed fact was actually caused. This implies providing the detailed
mediating mechanisms in a non-interrupted causal chain across time, ending with
the explanandum, or—considering the second motivation—the explanation can
follow the covering-law model by showing that a is an instance of a generally
recurring process that follows a universal law.
Second, explanation-seeking questions can require the explanation of a contrast
(for example, of the form: Why does object a have property P, rather than prop-
erty P′? [P-contrast]; Why does object a have property P, while object b has prop-
erty P′? [O-contrast]; Why does object a have property P at time t, but property
P′ at time t′? [T-contrast]). The explanations of contrasts can have a therapeutic
function, or are motivated by “unexpectedness.” They isolate causes that help us
to reach the ideal (P-contrast), comparing the actual fact with the one we would
like to be the case. Or they could be intended to help us to remove the observed
difference between objects, or they could be meant to tell us why things have been
otherwise than we expected them to be.

explanations: Erik Weber and Jeroen Van Bouwel, “Can We Dispense with the Structural Explanation
of Social Facts?” Economics and Philosophy 18 (2002), 259-275; Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik
Weber, “Remote Causes, Bad Explanations?” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 32 (2002),
437-449.
. P and P′ are supposed to be mutually exclusive.
 a pragmatist defense of explanatory pluralism 171
The form of a contrastive explanation enables us to obtain information about
the features that differentiate the actual causal history from its (un)actualized al-
ternative, by isolating the causes that make the difference. In so doing, contras-
tive explanations respond to the discrepancy that bothers the questioner between
what seems to be the case and what the questioner believes ought to have been
the case.
Van Fraassen also introduced the concept of relevance relation in order to deal
with the fact that “verbally the same why-questions may be a request for different
types of explanatory factors.” His example (an adapted version of an example
given by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics) is the following:
Suppose a father asks his teenage son, “Why is the porch light on?” and the son replies
“The porch switch is closed and the electricity is reaching the bulb through that switch.”
At this point you are most likely to feel that the son is being impudent. This is because
you are most likely to think that the sort of answer the father needed was something like:
“Because we are expecting company.” But it is easy to imagine a less likely question con-
text: the father and the son are re-wiring the house and the father, unexpectedly seeing the
porch light on, fears that he has caused a short circuit that bypasses the porch light switch.
In the second case, he is not interested in the human expectations or desires that led to the
depressing of the switch.

Of course, one can try to make the relevance relation explicit by rephrasing the
why-question. In van Fraassen’s example the format of the explanation-seeking
question is:
Why does object a have property P?

This formulation allows for many relevance relations. More specific formulations
would be:
What is the cause of a having property P?
What is the function of a having property P?
What is the reason for a having property P?

These formulations put restrictions on acceptable answers, because more specific

forms of “why” are substituted for the general “why.”
An answer to an explanation-seeking question will be adequate for an explain-
ee only if the explanans has the expected relevance relation to the explanandum.
This is a basic insight of the erotetic approach to explanations that we adumbrate
in this paper.

III. Example 1: An imaginary case of cholera

In this section and the following one, we will present examples that allow us to
argue for explanatory pluralism by illustrating how the framework of section II
can be applied. In our first example, we will use only structural explanations.
Structural explanations must be understood here as macro-level explanations that
are causal (that is, they explain a social phenomenon by referring to another social

. Van Fraassen, The Scientific Image, 131.

. ibid.
172 Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber

phenomenon or structure that caused the first one). This definition puts restric-
tions on the content of such explanations (for example, causally relevant informa-
tion about individual agents is excluded, because that is micro-level information),
but leaves room for significant differences. For instance, the social event that is
invoked as explanans can be temporally remote from the explanandum or be very
proximate. Many social scientists and philosophers of social science have taken
the position that, ceteris paribus, an explanation that invokes the most proximate
cause is better than an explanation that invokes a more remote cause. In order to
argue against that position, we introduce a fictitious but realistic (because it is
based on real causal knowledge) example. Two neighboring cities, Koch City and
Miasma City, have a history of simultaneous cholera epidemics: every ten years
or so, after excessive rainfall, cholera breaks out in both cities. Suddenly, in the
year X, the population of Koch City remains healthy after a summer with lots of
rain, while Miasma City is hit by cholera again. Why? Explaining the difference
can help Miasma City in the future (therapeutic function). An explanation in terms
of proximate causes would look as follows:
(I) The population of Koch City remained healthy, while Miasma City was hit
by cholera, because cholera bacilli were reproduced on a large scale in Miasma
City, while their number remained very limited in Koch City.
An explanation in terms of remote causes would be:
(II) Koch City built a sewage system after the previous outbreak, in the year
X-10. Miasma city does not have a sewage system.

Let us look at this example from the perspective of section II (more specifically,
from the two possible motivations, therapy and unexpectedness, we distinguished
for asking contrastive why-questions). Explanation (II) refers to a human inter-
vention that was present in one case, absent in the other. Therefore, it can serve a
therapeutic function. Explanation (I) does not have any therapeutic value, because
it leaves us with the question of why the reproduction of cholera bacilli were
minimized in Koch City, and therefore how they could be minimized in Miasma
City. This example is not unique: in every context where the proximate causes
do not relate to human interventions, only explanations in terms of more remote
causes can have a therapeutic function.
If we look at the example from a different perspective, namely unexpectedness
as motivation of the contrastive question, we reach a similar conclusion. Explana-
tion (I) does not tell us why the line of reasoning that led us to expect an epidemic
in both cities again (heavy rain, hence lots of cholera bacilli, hence cholera) went
wrong. Only the explanation in terms of the remote cause uncovers the mistake we
made, thereby removing the mystery that derives from the unexpectedness of the
actual outcome in year X. Nevertheless, in certain circumstances explanation by
means of a proximate cause (explanation [I]) would be preferable to explanation
in terms of remote causes (explanation [II]). Thus, if one didn’t know that cholera
was caused by certain bacilli, and didn’t know there is a causal relation between
. Note that this is not just a reformulation of the initial question. This answer says that the proxi-
mate cause of cholera is bacteria, and not, for example, the inhalation of bad gases (miasmata).
 a pragmatist defense of explanatory pluralism 173
the presence of sewage and the spread of these bacilli, then explanation (I) would
explain the unexpectedness of the result that Koch City but not Miasma City expe-
rienced a reduction in cases of cholera, whereas explanation (II) would not.
In general, we should select the content of our explanation in such a way that it
is adequate relative to our motivation for asking the question (that is, relative to
our epistemic interests). This strategy sometimes results in explanations contain-
ing remote causes, sometimes in explanations containing proximate causes. So
we have a pragmatic reason for being pluralist in the remote causes vs. proximate
causes debate: depending on the context, one or the other type of explanation is
the best relative to our motivation for asking the question.

IV. Example 2: Informal truces

Our second example derives from Robert Axelrod’s analysis of unofficial truces.10
In World War I, there were unofficial truces by units on both sides: each side
continued to fire its weapons but without intending to inflict much damage. Axel-
rod explains these truces as rational behavior based on a strategy of conditional
cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma situation (this strategy amounts to:
start with cooperation, and keep on cooperating as long as the opponent cooper-
ates). Trench warfare, which guarantees a relatively stable, clearly identifiable
enemy (units are not replaced overnight) whose reactions can be easily observed,
presents an excellent situation for conditional cooperation to emerge. In different
types of warfare (Blitzkrieg, guerrilla) similar truces are impossible because there
is no stable enemy and no clearly identifiable reaction and response. Axelrod’s
question is one of plain fact:
(III) Why were there informal truces in World War I?

But we can also formulate some interesting contrastive questions about these
truces, for instance:
(IV) Why did unit A have informal truces, while unit B kept on fighting? (O-
contrast)
(V) Why were there informal truces in World War I, but not in World War II?
(T-contrast)

Before we discuss possible answers to these questions, we should define the

terms that we will use. By an intentional explanation we mean an explanation
of a social fact in terms of the intentional states (desires, opinions, perceived op-
portunities) and actions of one or more individuals. In our conceptual scheme,
intentional explanations are always micro-explanations. As we have already men-
tioned, we define structural explanations as macro-level explanations that are
causal. (Functional explanations are macro-level explanations that are not causal;

. For a more extensive discussion (including real examples relating to the political history of Latin
American countries), see Van Bouwel and Weber, “Remote Causes, Bad Explanations?”
10. This example is elaborated by Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation (New York:
Basic Books, 1984), and discussed in Daniel Little, Varieties of Social Explanation (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1991), 58.
174 Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber

see section VI). Structural explanations come in different varieties: sometimes

they invoke proximate causes, sometimes remote causes (see section III). They
can also differ with respect to the kind of social event they invoke as explanans:
it can be of a materialistic nature or be an idealistic factor. Intentional explana-
tions differ from idealistic structural explanations in that the latter use properties
of groups rather than intentional states of individuals. Examples of such group
properties are: “A majority in this group believes X,” “Everyone in this group
wants Y,” “Some people in this group possess personality trait Z (lazy, aggressive,
stubborn, …),” and so on.
Let us now look at possible answers to questions (III), (IV), and (V). Axelrod’s
original question (III) is about a “stylized fact,” not about a specific, concrete fact.
This question can be answered (as is done by Axelrod) by providing a possible
belief-desire constellation that leads to an informal truce. Axelrod’s explanation is
an intentional explanation, highlighting the rational behavior of individuals.
A possible motivation for questions (IV) and (V) would be the desire to prevent
similar truces (a military strategist might be interested in this). The best answers
(but not the only possible ones) to these questions are structural ones. In the case
of question (IV), the answer should refer to a difference in “corporate culture”
between units A and B: unit B is a very docile or a very heroic one, such that its
members obey orders without questioning them, or they really like fighting; unit
A has a different culture: it is a critical unit that does not like fighting at all. (Note
that this explanation is situated at the macro level, because it refers to shared val-
ues and attitudes [group culture] rather than to individual thoughts and actions).
In the case of question (V), the answer should refer to material circumstances: in
World War II, there was no trench warfare, units did not have stable enemies, so
conditional cooperation could not emerge.11
These structural explanations are not the only possible answers to questions
(IV) and (V). Intentional explanations are possible, too, but the structural explana-
tions are much more efficient, because the information about individual soldiers in
the units is not essential for understanding the difference between A and B, or be-
tween units in World War I and in World War II. As in section III, even considering
one specific question, several answers might be possible. But the difference with
section III is that efficiency rather than adequacy seems to be the pragmatic reason
for preferring one explanation over the other. Efficiency refers to the amount of
(research) work that needs to be done in order to construct the explanation and to
show that it is correct. The intentional explanations of (IV) and (V) require a lot
of information about individual agents, while structural explanations do not con-
tain that kind of information. So, ceteris paribus, structural explanations are to be
preferred in this case for pragmatic reasons, because they require less work. (We
acknowledge that the structural explanations presuppose certain intentionality on
the part of the soldiers—they are instrumentally rational, and it is only because

11. In this particular case, there is no correct “idealistic” answer to the second question, because
there is no factor of this nature that “makes a difference”; and there is no correct “materialistic”
answer to the first question, because the material factors are identical. But there is no reason to gener-
alize this: it is possible that in some cases we may have a correct idealistic and a correct materialistic
answer to the same question.
 a pragmatist defense of explanatory pluralism 175
they are so that the structural conditions cited as explanations for their behavior
can be the causes they are. But this intentionality is of a perfectly general sort that
applies to agents as such, not to particular agents and their specific beliefs and
desires. As a result, the structural explanations continue to be far more efficient
than possible particular intentional explanations.)

V. Purpose-based and question-based pluralism

In their famous paper on explanatory pluralism, Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit
conclude: “Thus, we can be ecumenical about explanations at different levels of
grain. We can say that whether one is to prefer a smaller grain or coarser grain ex-
planation in a given case depends on what one’s perspective or purpose is.”12 We
call this purpose-based pluralism. Actually, Jackson and Pettit offer one particular
variant of purpose-based pluralism:
Purpose-based pluralism (version J&P). Many explanation-seeking questions can be an-
swered in different ways (employing different types of explanation). In every context, it
is possible to compare alternative explanations with respect to their accuracy (correctness,
that is, their relation with reality) and adequacy (their relation to what the explainee expects
from the explanation, the purpose of the explanation). In most cases adequacy enables us to
rank correct explanations and single out one that is better than the others.

Our examples in section III support this kind of pluralism. Our examples in sec-
tion IV (where efficiency turned out to be important) give us a reason to propose
our own variant of this purpose-based pluralism:
Purpose-based pluralism (version VB&W). Many explanation-seeking questions can be
answered in different ways (employing different types of explanation). In every context, it
is possible to compare alternative explanations with respect to their accuracy (correctness,
that is, their relation with reality), adequacy (their relation to what the explainee expects
from the explanation) and their efficiency (the amount of work that is needed to construct
the explanation). In most cases adequacy combined with efficiency enables us to rank cor-
rect explanations and single out one that is better than the others.

However, we think there are reasons for also adopting another type of pluralism,
which we call question-based pluralism. Let us first give a brief example and then
define this sort of explanatory pluralism.
With respect to the informal truces discussed in section IV, we can also ask non-
contrastive questions that are more specific than question (III), for instance:
(VI) Why did unit A have an informal truce in period t?

This question seems to require a micro-explanation: in order to answer this ques-

tion, we have to refer to the actual desires, beliefs, and decisions of members of
this unit. A general rational-choice explanation, as in Axelrod’s answer to (III),
will not do, because what we have to explain is why something that actually oc-
curred did so, not how some stylized fact was possible. If we combine this with
the different questions we described in section IV, the conclusion is that there are
a lot of questions (each resulting from some epistemic interest) we can ask about
12. Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, “In Defense of Explanatory Ecumenism,” Economics and
Philosophy 8 (1992), 16.
176 Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber

the phenomenon of unofficial truces. The fact that we can ask different questions
about the same social phenomenon can in itself be a sufficient reason for being
pluralist, provided that some questions allow for only one type of answer. (In sec-
tions VI and VII we will argue that such cases exist.) Here the pluralism stems not
from the different types of answers that can be given to a single question, but from
the possibility of there being different questions about the same phenomenon:
Question-based pluralism. For every social or historical phenomenon, there are many in-
teresting and legitimate explanation-seeking questions that can be asked. In some cases, the
relevance relations that are inherent in these questions are different, so that it is impossible
to answer all of them by means of one type of explanation.

VI. Example 3: Nation-states

In a functional explanation we explain a social structure or phenomenon by giving

its function or purpose, which is an explanation in terms of its effects rather its
causes. For example, it might be claimed that the explanation for a certain social
practice in a society is the way in which it contributes to social stability or group
solidarity, which in turn contribute to the health of the society of which the social
practice is a part. An explanation of a phenomenon in terms of its effects cannot
be a causal explanation of that phenomenon.
Let us now illustrate the differences qua explanatory information one can get
from the different forms of explanation by comparing functional and intentional
explanations. This example will illustrate as well the importance of the relevance
relation. Consider the following explanation-seeking question:
(VII) Why does the nation-state exist in capitalist society?

Such a formulation allows for many relevance relations, so we could specify the
questions, for example, in the following way:
(VIII) What is the cause of there being nation-states in capitalist society?
(IX) What is the function of there being nation-states in capitalist society?

Before we look at the differences in answering questions (VIII) and (IX), we want
to remind the reader of the debate between Jon Elster and Gerald Cohen on the
use of functional explanations. Jon Elster prefers the intentional type of explana-
tion (one that fits the rational-choice pattern). This type of explanation shows
how individual actions result in the collective outcomes that interest Marxists by
uncovering their underlying causal mechanisms; for Elster “there is no place for
functional explanation in the social sciences.”13 Gerald Cohen, on the other hand,
defends the use of functional explanation. In his Karl Marx’s Theory of History:
A Defence, he brought all this to bear on political examples of special interest to
Marxists.14 For Marxist social scientists it is a standard procedure “to explain any

13. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), viii.
14. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978).
 a pragmatist defense of explanatory pluralism 177
given institution, policy or behavior by, first, searching for the class whose objec-
tive interest they serve and, next, explaining them by these interests.”15
Debating with Cohen, Elster contends that rational-choice and game theory
should replace functional explanations in historical materialism. Cohen, on the
other hand, claims that such a functional explanation need not be backed by an un-
derlying causal mechanism, especially when these mechanisms are the intentions
of agents; Cohen asserts that Marxists focus on forces and relations of production
that direct and constrain class actions and interests, and these are not reducible to
agents’ intentions. In contrast, for Elster, anything whatsoever can be explained as
the result of rational intentional actions, and ultimately in terms of the resources
provided by game theory.
However, the whole debate between intentionality vs. function as the baseline
of (Marxist) explanation seems misguided once the explananda are made clear;
the explanation-seeking questions (and the relevance relations) Elster and Cohen
want to deal with differ, and they can be seen once we specify them. Cohen, in
defending Marxists using functional explanations, is focusing on questions like
(IX): What is the function of there being nation-states in capitalist society? Marx-
ist theory will provide us with a functional explanation, that is, the state exists to
protect the interests of the capitalist class. This explanation lives up to the general
Marxist pattern that the character of the legal, political, and cultural superstruc-
ture is explained in terms of its consolidating the economic structure. Elster’s
intentionalist explanations, on the other hand, answer questions like (VIII): What
is the cause of there being nation-states in capitalist society? His answer refers to
the emergence and particular form taken by the nation-state, the relevant cluster of
interactions that is produced by agents acting out their intentions (one could think
of the events leading up to the Peace of Westphalia [1648], traditionally viewed
as the consecration of the nation-state).
Question (VII) has the following format (see section II)
(A) Why does object a have property P?

The formats of (VIII) and (IX) are respectively:

(B) What is the cause of a having property P?
(C) What is the function of a having property P?

Question (VII) certainly has many possible adequate answers, because it is very
vague. Question (VIII) is more specific, but it still leaves many options open:
intentional and structural explanations of different types. Finally, question (IX)
clearly requires a functional explanation as an answer: this relevance relation is
built into the question. The question arises whether all three of these questions
are legitimate, and in particular whether question (IX), with its prompt for a func-
tional explanation, is.
An “anti-functionalist” who wants to ban functional explanations can follow
two strategies. The first is to argue that functional explanations are epistemo-
logically suspect, so they should be banned completely. The second strategy is to
15. Jon Elster, “Functional Explanation in Social Science,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Social
Science, ed. Michael Martin and Lee McIntyre (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 406.
178 Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber

argue that functional explanations do not have any intrinsic value: they are rough
sketches of causal explanations, to be substituted by causal explanations as soon
as possible. Functional explanations then are allowed, but an ideal explanatory
text about a phenomenon will not contain any functional explanations. If func-
tional explanations are the best we can give, this only means that further research
is necessary.
In order to argue that functional explanations have an intrinsic value (and thus
have their place in ideal explanatory texts), we have to argue that questions of
type (C) are legitimate, interesting questions for their own sake. This means that
the focus in defending pluralism must be on questions, not on answers: once we
admit that questions of type (C) are intrinsically interesting, a minimal pluralism
(namely, allowing both functional versus causal explanations) is required.
How can we argue that questions of type (C) are intrinsically interesting? Causal
explanations sometimes provide us with tools to change our social environment.
They ensure that the social sciences can in principle perform their technical func-
tion, that is, they can be used as instruments for achieving certain pre-established
social goals. Questions of type (C) are instrumental in ensuring that social science
also can have a critical function: by asking questions about the function of certain
institutions or patterns of behavior, one can legitimize or criticize the existence
and/or properties of these institutions or patterns. (This consideration, of course,
is not sufficient to show that questions prompting functional explanations are le-
gitimate, as perhaps the social sciences should not, and perhaps cannot, fulfill
their critical function. But this consideration provides at least a prima facie reason
for believing that questions prompting functional explanations are legitimate.)

VII. Example 4: The French Revolution (and other peasant revolutions)

As our last example, we will use an article by Michael Taylor on revolutionary

collective action16 in which he tries to develop a reformulation of the thesis in
Theda Skocpol’s classic States and Social Revolutions. What interests us here is
how Taylor defends a small-grain preference (a preference for individual, lower-
level explanations) in historical sociology against higher-level explanations of the
non-voluntarist sort provided by Skocpol.
Taylor defends the thesis that the higher-level phenomenon or entity (the revo-
lution) is nothing more than a set of intentional actions; in this way the higher
level is ontologically dependent on the lower level. What are the consequences
of this for explaining revolutions? Taylor states that providing micro-founda-
tions does not necessarily lead to an incompatibility between the higher-level and
lower-level account:
It should be clear from this brief review that the account given by Skocpol and others of
the social-structural preconditions for successful peasant insurrections in three great social
revolutions is quite compatible with the rational choice theory of collective action if what
I had to say earlier about community is accepted. But I am saying something stronger than
this, namely that the thin theory of collective action provides part of the explanation of

16. Michael Taylor, “Rationality and Revolutionary Collective Action,” in Rationality and
Revolution, ed. Michael Taylor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 63-97.
 a pragmatist defense of explanatory pluralism 179
social revolution. This is not Skocpol’s view. For her . . . a proper understanding of social
revolutions requires the adoption of a nonvoluntarist, structural perspective.17

Hence, Taylor is not a priori against the higher-level approach, and even (implic-
itly) relies on it in order to formulate his alternative. However, the higher-level
approach should be complemented with micro-foundations, which are more basic
in his view.
In order to provide micro-foundations, Taylor shows how the participation of
vast numbers of peasants in collective action could be explained by using the
logic of collective action advanced by Mancur Olson. Taylor invokes the use of
economic incentives and selective social incentives, especially those support-
ing conditional cooperation. Taylor calls this a thin theory of collective action.
According to his thin theory, peasant collective action in revolutions was based
on communal norms and sanctions (as many historians have argued), and this is
mainly why the large numbers of peasants were able to overcome the free-rider
problem familiar to students of collective action.
But starting from the idea of micro-foundations Taylor draws some conclusions
about which explanations are preferable. Taylor advocates “that good explana-
tion should be, amongst other things, as fine-grained as possible: causal links
connecting events distant in space-time should be replaced wherever possible by
chains of ‘shorter’ causal links.”18 So, ontological dependence leads, according to
Taylor, to a preference for fine-grain explanations. (Taylor tolerates higher-level,
structural explanations, but thinks they must ultimately be cashed out in terms of
intentional explanations that explain by means of the instrumental rationality of
the agents involved.)
Let us now consider three explanation-seeking questions related to Taylor’s
reformulation of Skocpol’s explanation of social revolutions:
(X) Why did the French Revolution start in 1789, rather than in 1750?
(XI) Why was there a revolution in Bourbon France, Manchu China, and Ro-
manov Russia?
(XII) Why did the French Revolution occur in 1789?

Question (X), which is a contrastive question (T-contrast), can be answered by

Skocpol’s theory. By using comparative methods, Skocpol formulated a structural
explanation for three successful modern social revolutions in agrarian-bureau-
cratic monarchies (the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions). The structural
conditions that, in her view, make a revolution possible (that is, the revolutions
can be successfully mounted only if these structural preconditions are met) relate
to the incapacity of the central state’s machinery, especially the weakening of the
state’s repressive capacity. This weakening is caused by external military (and
economic) pressure: because of the backward agrarian economy and the power
of the landed upper class in the agrarian-bureaucratic monarchy, any attempt to
increase military power leads to a fiscal crisis. Escalating international compe-

17. Ibid., 76.

18. Ibid., 96, where he refers to Jon Elster’s Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the
Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 24, 28-29.
180 Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber

tition and humiliations particularly symbolized by unexpected defeats in wars

(which inspired autocratic authorities to attempt reforms) trigger social revolu-
tions. These macroscopic causal relations can explain T-contrasts (in the most
efficient way). The foreign military pressure that triggered the respective social
revolutions, were: Bourbon France (1787–1789): financially exhausted after the
War for American Independence and because of the competition with England in
general; Romanov Russia (1917): massive defeats in World War I; Manchu China
(1911–1916): Sino-Japanese War (1895) and the Boxer debacle (1899–1901). The
point here is that a Skocpol-type macro-explanation can explain why the French
Revolution occurred in 1789 rather than 1750: at the earlier time the conditions
necessary for a successful revolution were not yet in place.
Question (XI), which is a question for the explanation of a set of similar facts,
might appear to be better addressed by Taylor: “When the peasant community was
sufficiently strong, then, it provided a social basis for collective action, including
revolutionary collective action and rebellions and other popular mobilizations.”19
The explanation Taylor provides refers to a property of a group or community.
Basically, it claims that if the coherence within groups or communities is strong,
a revolution can occur, and that is exactly the case in Bourbon France, Manchu
China, and Romanov Russia. But parsed in this way, it ought to be clear that
Taylor’s is not in fact a micro-level explanation: it is a macro-level idealistic ex-
planation. The important thing is that questions like (XI), which are about similar
facts, can only be answered by means of a macro-explanation. If we ask questions
like this, the underlying aim is unification: we want to know what is common in
the causal ancestry of the different phenomena. In our example, we want to know
what the causal mechanisms that led to these three revolutions have in common.
This question cannot be answered by giving three stories at the micro-level: we
need an account that points at their similarities.
Finally, answering question (XII) requires a micro-level explanation: we have
to know who did what in order to make the revolution occur. That is, even if the
macro-structural conditions were in place by 1789 in France, it still took the ac-
tivities of particular agents with their particular beliefs and desires to respond to
these conditions at the particular time they did. This can only be done by means of
a fine-grained intentional explanation of the sort Taylor trumpets.
Our three questions about the French Revolution provide an argument for both
question-based and purpose-based pluralism. Some questions, like (XII), can be
answered only by a micro-explanation; other questions, like (XI), need a macro-
explanation. This is due to the inherent relevance relation: in (XI) the “why”
means “what are the common aspects of the causal ancestry of,” while in question
(XII) the “why” stands for “what are the intentional acts that served as the causal
mechanism that led to.” And unless we discard one of them as an illegitimate
question that should not be asked, such pairs (or triplets . . .) of questions consti-
tute good reasons for being a pluralist, even if for each separate question only one
type of answer is adequate. This supports our question-based pluralism. Still other
questions, like (X), can be answered on both levels, but the macro-level is the

19. Taylor, “Rationality and Revolutionary Collective Action,” 68.

 a pragmatist defense of explanatory pluralism 181
most efficient (we do not need the details about who did what in 1789 and 1750 in
order to understand the T-contrast). Question (X) is like the ones we discussed in
section III and IV, and supports purpose-based pluralism.

VIII. Against relativism

Let us repeat something we stated in the introduction. Explanatory pluralists sub-

scribe to the following two theses:
(1) There are no general exclusion rules with respect to explanations in history
and social science.
(2) There are no general preference rules with respect to explanations in history
and social science.

Within these restrictions, several positions are possible. A relativistic pluralist

will claim that neither exclusion rules nor preference rules should be respected
at the local level either: for each why-question, there are many possible answers,
and no ranking is possible. Our discussions in sections III–VII provide arguments
against this relativistic position.
In section III, we compared two explanations that are (factually) accurate, and
our example clarified how the pragmatic criterion of adequacy can provide a way
to avoid relativism: once our aim is fixed, we can rank the explanations as more
or less adequate relative to our aim. In section IV, our examples about informal
truces illustrate that efficiency in some cases is a reason for preferring macro-ex-
planations.
Our examples in sections VI and VII point at local exclusion rules rather than
local preference rules. In some cases some types of explanations are not appropri-
ate because of the relevance relations inherent in the explanation-seeking ques-
tion. This position is also non-relativistic, because it is possible to give arguments
for or against the legitimacy and usefulness questions with certain relevance rela-
tions. For instance, we have argued that unificatory questions and functional ques-
tions are legitimate. These types of questions cannot be discarded arbitrarily.

IX. Conclusion

Thus, a battery of non-relativist criteria exists that provide a strong basis for
preferring one explanation or explanation-type over another even though for
any phenomenon there is a plurality of possible and legitimate explanations and
explanation-types. These criteria include adequacy, efficiency, and relevance. In
evolutionary biology, evolution is said to have several causes, sometimes called
evolutionary pressures: migration, mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift.
Likewise, we have argued that the plurality of explanations in history and the
social sciences has different causes and possible justifications: adequacy, effi-
ciency, and strictness of the relevance relation inherent in some questions. These
three plurality pressures enable us to give a pragmatist argument for pluralism
(our first aim), and allow for the distinction between question-based and purpose-
pluralism (our second aim).
182 Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber

A consequence of our pluralism is that the ideal explanatory text for a social or
historical phenomenon (that is, the comprehensive account of this phenomenon)
will contain explanations of various sorts. But this does not entail relativism, be-
cause of the local exclusion and preference rules discussed in section VIII.

Ghent University, Belgium