2/ Quantitive methods AND MOST randomized experiments used to study complex systems (like society and culture) place all of their attentive mass on the search for events which produce sudden, dramatic, and *MEASURABLE* changes.
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3/ That's a problem because those events need not exist and even when they do they may not describe the bulk of the process which, chained together, AFFORDS the change. Worse, the desperate search tends to exclude obvious causal elements irreducible to discrete events.
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4/ Processes matter. And, processes are hard to measure in open and UNCLOSABLE systems. Qualitative methods and scholarship are very good at identifying (often immeasurable) components of and actors in a system.
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5/ In quantitive (information retrieval) terms, such qualitative methods may have lower precision than quantitive methods (albeit not always); but, it also has higher recall. And, for complex systems, recall – good coverage over the set components and actors – is very important.
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Want to really blow your mind about causality? Read Georg H. von Wright. Good examples are Determinism and Knowledge of the Future (short) or Explanation and Understanding (long). Also, from his book Practical Reason, the chapter Determinism and Knowledge of Man.
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Follow it up with Wittgenstein's On Certainty and you may never believe a single thing you think you observe.
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Don't read any of these until you've defended, tho. Philosophy is the deepest rabbit hole.
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