Abstract The method of decreasing abstraction (MDA) has been proposed as a strategy for developing sociological models that balance parsimony and descriptive adequacy. This paper reconstructs Lindenberg’s version of MDA and situates it within broader debates on unrealistic assumptions and the tension between instrumentalism and realism. Lindenberg’s MDA can be viewed as a special case of a more general class of theory-development strategies. It combines explicit heuristic rules for the context of discovery with substantive auxiliary theories that guide the construction of more specialized models. Empirically, however, MDA has been taken up only selectively and rarely in the demanding form envisaged by Lindenberg. Drawing on structuralist reconstructions in the philosophy of science, we analyze hierarchically nested model variants as a general structural feature of research programs, arising from theory-building strategies akin to implicit forms of MDA. We further argue, first, that Lindenberg’s own version of MDA, with its strong commitments to specific auxiliary theories, is too narrow to serve as a general method, and second, that it may often be more promising to use MDA as a strategy that begins with careful reconstructions of existing research programs. We conclude with reflections on the implications for theoretical progress and on the role and balance of theoretical quality criteria such as parsimony and coherence with background knowledge when choosing between competing models.
Sonntag et al. (Mon,) studied this question.