This chapter resolves the problem posed in the previous chapter, namely, the Scotist objection to the instrument doctrine. It argues that of five different strategies, only one solves the problem of coherence, and it is a solution found not only in some of Aquinas’s mature statements on instrumental causality but also in the theology of Matthias Joseph Scheeben (1835-1888), who knew the intricate debates about the doctrine after Aquinas’s time and had developed a unique response to the Scotist objection. The chapter defends Scheeben’s view, known as ’extrinsic elevation’, as the way to preserve the coherence of the two claims that God alone is the cause of grace and that Christ’s humanity is an instrumental efficient cause of grace.

This chapter poses the most difficult objection for the instrument doctrine, in particular as Aquinas conceives of it. For Aquinas, a created cause, Christ’s humanity, produces divine effects as an instrumental cause. But the tradition has affirmed that God alone is the cause of grace in the soul, and no created cause can produce grace. John Duns Scotus puts this objection to Aquinas’s account of instrumental causality, and this chapter argues that the criticism appears to succeed. If a created cause participates in the production of grace, as Aquinas argues, then Scotus argues that Aquinas fails to maintain the distinction of natures and powers in Christ basic to Chalcedonian Christology. For Christ’s humanity is taken up into God’s power and brings about the deification of the human person immediately, something only divine power can do. The ground is prepared for a response to this objection in the following chapter.

From cradle to grave human beings actively strive to abstract meaning from experience. The meaning making capacity builds step-by-step, beginning in the earliest years. At each phase of life, new capacities emerge and previous limitations in meaning making can be overcome. By adolescence all of the basic tools for making meaning have been acquired. All that remains to be achieved is the wisdom that comes from accrued lived experience in the subsequent years. Increasingly, a narrative identity may be formed.

Preschoolers purposefully seek to understand the environment. Their social world expands, as they work hard to interact with peers. Accompanying this active stance are surges in memory and other aspects of understanding the self in the world. Coherence in the organization of the emerging person becomes much more apparent, in both behavior and the child’s internal world, as seen in the child’s representation. Inquisitiveness and beginning understanding of causality are major strengths of the toddler. Because this understanding is limited, toddlers may at times attribute too much credence to their own perspective and too great a role to the self in causation. Thus, they can feel bad when negative experiences such as divorce happen, believing that they are the cause.

The chapter provides a novel account of perceptual discrimination (krinein) in Aristotle. Against the widespread view that the most basic perceptual acts consist in noticing differences between two or more perceived qualities, I argue that discrimination is for Aristotle more like sifting, winnowing on a sieve: it consists in identifying – with an ultimate authority – the quality of an external object as distinct from any other quality of the given range that the object could have. The chapter further explores how the notion of discrimination is embedded by Aristotle within his causal assimilation model of perception. I argue that the central notion of a discriminative mean (mesotēs), introduced in An. 2.11, is intended to capture the role of the perceptive soul as the controlling factor of a homeostatic mechanism underlying perception. As such the notion lays the groundwork for resolving the apparent conflict between the passivity of perception and the impassivity of the soul (as analysed in Chapter 5). The prospect is further explored in Chapter 7. The present chapter concludes by arguing that Aristotle conceives perceptual discrimination as a holistic assessment of the external object acting on the perceiver, including those of its features which are not causally efficacious.

This chapter considers the multivariate case, extending the univariate concepts to the vector time series case. We consider vector autoregressions from different points of view.

The first chapter contains an overview of what is accepted as good practice. We review several general ethical guidelines. These can be used to appreciate good research and to indicate where and how research does not adhere to them. Good practice is “what we all say we (should) adhere to.” In the second part of this chapter, the focus is more on specific ethical guidelines for statistical analysis. Of course, there is overlap with the more general guidelines, but there are also a few specifically relevant to statistics: Examples are misinterpreting p values and malpractice such as p hacking and harking.

Chapter 10 examines correlation, the statistical procedure used to measure the degree of association or relationship between variables. It is bivariate, since we typically apply this statistical technique to measure or describe the association between two variables or groups. The correlation coefficient, which measures the degree and direction of an association, is discussed, as are some of the issues regarding the application and interpretation of correlations. The chapter also outlines the many different measures of association but focuses on Pearson’s r. It emphasizes the definitional formula and z-scores for understanding and computing the correlation coefficient.

This is a translation of the excerpts published in Naturwissenschaften of Grete Hermann’s 1935 essay on philosophy of quantum mechanics, recently translated into English. Her main thesis, in line with her natural-philosophical training and neo-Kantian commitments, is to argue that quantum mechanics does not refute the principle of causality. Quantum mechanics cannot be completed by, hidden variables, because it is already causally complete (albeit retroductively). In establishing this provocative thesis, she makes important use of Bohr’s principles of correspondence and complementarity and of Weizsäcker's version of the gamma-ray microscope, arguing that the lesson of quantum mechanics is the impossibility of an absolute description of nature independent of the context of observation.

The chapter begins with the observation that global history has an ambivalent attitude towards explanation. In many cases, the mere presentation of sources and voices from many different parts of the world seems sufficient to justify a global approach. The need for explanation is ignored or even denied. In other cases, global explanation is eagerly pursued, but often at the expense of more complex explanatory models that incorporate factors at different scales. In this perspective, global explanations are claimed to be inherently superior and a privileged way of explaining historical phenomena. After a cursory survey of current positions on causality and explanation in general methodology and ‘formal’ historical theory, the chapter proposes a brief typology of explanatory strategies. It goes on to discuss the peculiarities of explanation within a framework of connections across great distances and cultural boundaries. The much-exclaimed concept of narrative explanation is found to be of limited value, as it underestimates the difficulties of producing coherent narratives on a global scale. Concepts offered in the social science literature, such as the analysis of mechanisms and temporal sequences, could be helpful in refining purely narrative approaches to explanation.

Sociology is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences. Empirically, a key goal is to find relations between variables. This is often done using naturally occurring data, survey data, or in-depth interviews. With such data, the challenge is to establish whether a relation between variables is causal or merely a correlation. One approach is to address the causality issue by applying proper statistical or econometric techniques, which is possible under certain conditions for some research questions. Alternatively, one can generate new data with experimental control in a laboratory or the field. It is precisely through this control via randomization and the manipulation of the causal factors of interest that the experimental method ensures – with a high degree of confidence – tests of causal explanations. In this chapter, the canonical approach to causality in randomized experiments (the Neyman–Rubin causal model) is first introduced. This model formalizes the idea of causality using the "potential outcomes" or "counterfactual" approach. The chapter then discusses the limits of the counterfactual approach and the key role of theory in establishing causal explanations in experimental sociology.

This chapter addresses the often-misunderstood concept of validity. Much of the methodological discussion around sociological experiments is framed in terms of internal and external validity. The standard view is that the more we ensure that the experimental treatment is isolated from potential confounds (internal validity), the more unlikely it is that the experimental results can be representative of phenomena of the outside world (external validity). However, other accounts describe internal validity as a prerequisite of external validity: Unless we ensure internal validity of an experiment, little can be said of the outside world. We contend in this chapter that problems of either external or internal validity do not necessarily depend on the artificiality of experimental settings or on the laboratory–field distinction between experimental designs. We discuss the internal–external distinction and propose instead a list of potential threats to the validity of experiments that includes "usual suspects" like selection, history, attrition, and experimenter demand effects and elaborate on how these threats can be productively handled in experimental work. Moreover, in light of the different types of experiments, we also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each regarding threats to internal and external validity.