Abstract

There are immense differences in the social sciences both as regards what is to be explained and how it is to be explained. I make an initial distinction between the understanding, construed roughly as acquiring a grasp of the generative mechanisms and structures at work in the world, natural and social, and explanation, which I construe as causal. I clarify several candidates for the objects of explanation and reject the idea that the “explanation of behavior”—if that means the acts of concrete situated persons—is ever the proper object of explanation. Critical to my account is the idea of a typical actor, created for purposes of explanation. I conclude by applying this analysis to the explanation of crime