Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

level components, namely the traders, and a higher-level
quantity, i.e. the price of the traded asset. The explanation
is successful if it can reproduce the characteristic higherlevel
pattern in a robust way, i.e. if the reproduced phenomenon
remains stable under perturbations in a reasonable
range of initial values. If it does succeed I would say
that one has identified a mechanism that brings about the
observed higher-level pattern. In order for such a mechanistic
explanation to be satisfactory it is often desirable to
single out—by appropriate modelling—what it is in the
interaction of the constituents that generates the macroscopic
patterns. One example is the swapping mechanism,
where traders change their strategy and swap from one
camp of traders to another, which brings about the transition
from quiet to volatile periods.
In conclusion, mechanistic explanations are
reductive in the sense that higher-level behaviour of a
complex system is explained in terms of interacting lowerlevel
components. However, mechanistic explanations are
not reductive in the sense that higher-level description and
conceptualisation was dispensable. But it is the case that
the irreducibility of autonomous higher-level description
allows for ‘reduction’ in the sense of a decrease of relevant
details on the micro level due to the fact that the causal
mechanisms needed for explanatory purposes are of a
structural nature. Thus the reference to structural
mechanisms in the social sciences makes the basic ideas
of methodological individualism compatible with higherlevel
explanations of collective social phenomena.
192
Reducing Complexity in the Social Sciences — Meinard Kuhlmann
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