ABSTRACT
This chapter covers some prominent and interesting themes in the social-scientific debate on mechanisms. It focuses on what is known as Coleman's diagram, which helps to identify the core challenges of mechanism-based theorizing in the social sciences. The chapter also provides a context in which to discuss the appeal of mechanism-based explanation among social scientists. It introduces a distinction between causal scenarios and causal mechanism schemes. The chapter discusses the use of agent-based simulation as a tool for mechanism-based theorizing and introduces the idea of meta-mechanism by way of illustrating social-scientific thinking about mechanisms. It shows how mechanistic ideas have been used in social-scientific debates about causal inference. The chapter attempts to show that mechanism-based thinking is a strong and expanding meta-theoretical idea in the social sciences. It also shows that some of the ideas, such as the distinction between causal scenarios and causal mechanism schemes, and the notion of metamechanisms, might also be of interest in other disciplines.
