Causality and determinism in the social sciences: A critique of empiricism

This article presents a critique of currently dominant views on causality and determinism in the social sciences. It is shown how the empiricist conception of causality — according to which causality is interpreted as the regular connection of events — underlies the causal modelling paradigm. Some criticisms of this approach are discussed in the first part of the article. In the second part, an alternative conception of causality, based upon a realist ontology, is outlined. It is argued that such a conception solves some of the fundamental shortcomings inherent to the empiricist conception of causality.