This article examines the tension between sociology and history as a methodological problem of reconciling general concepts with historical specificity. It assesses evolutionary theory as one influential attempt to address this challenge. Focusing on Neo-Darwinian social evolutionism, in particular on W. G. Runciman’s selectionist framework, the article argues that evolutionary theory does not establish the general causal mechanisms it claims to identify, but instead, provides a vocabulary for describing recurrent features of historical processes. The argument therefore proposes a reconceptualization of evolutionary theory as a Weberian ideal-typical framework whose value is heuristic, descriptive, and comparative rather than causal.
Can measurement provide an independent source of evidence in the human sciences? Recent philosophy of measurement often suggests that it cannot. This essay argues that this conclusion is too strong: even in the human sciences, instruments can sometimes be developed so that the evidence they provide is independent of the substantive theories they in turn put to the test. Psychometric instrument development provides the most challenging case, but the claim survives it. The argument does not deny the roles of models, statistics, judgment, or error; it shows that these need not collapse the distinction between evidence and theory.
Since its foundational manifestos, analytical sociologists have stressed the importance of building a catalogue of social mechanisms, understood as a toolbox to provide mechanistic explanations of social phenomena. Despite its centrality, the catalogue has remained largely underdeveloped. We assess and operationalize the idea of such a catalogue of mechanisms by specifying what its construction would entail given analytical sociologists' other theoretical commitments. We then contrast this operationalization to analytical sociologists' current practice. We argue that the catalogue project exposes a mismatch between analytical sociology's empirical successes and how its proponents conceptualize knowledge accumulation and generalization.
