Abstract

In the last decades philosophers of science and social scientists promoted the view that knowledge of mechanisms might help causal inference considerably in the social sciences. Mechanisms, however, can only assist causal inference effectively if scientists have a means to identify them correctly. Some scholars suggested that process-tracing might be a helpful strategy in this respect. Shared criteria to assess its performance, however, are not available yet; furthermore, the criteria proposed so far tie the validity of process-tracing findings to the specific kind of evidence it uses. In this paper I shall propose a criterion to assess process-tracing performance in cases in which favorable epistemic circumstances do not occur and the existing criteria thus fail to apply. The criterion I propose does not double as a condition for validity. Rather, it aims to assess whether the mechanism process-tracing outlines constitutes admissible evidence for the hypothesis at hand. It will be argued that only if this requirement is fulfilled process-tracing can be used as an effective complement for causal inference