The DOI matches its DataCite record.
It Ain'T Necessarily So-Or Is It?
Open accessAbstract
Scholars who have couched their propositions in the form of necessary conditions owe a great debt to Gary Goertz for his recent work evaluating the status of claims to necessity and developing methods for testing them. In his most recent essay, Goertz makes a powerful case that necessary conditions hypotheses can reasonably be understood as probabilistic, not deterministic. Goertz suggests two benefits from this reconceptualization: necessary conditions hypotheses are more likely to get a fair hearing from social scientists who would otherwise dismiss them as deterministic, and those hypotheses will not be held hostage to single counter-examples that would unfairly be taken as disconfirming when in fact they likely represent measurement error.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
If the scope of an inductive theory is made to correspond to the set of countries studied, conditions that go hand in hand with an outcome are hardly causal explanations.
“while certain conditions may perhaps go hand in hand with a particular outcome (for instance, being registered in a course to get an A, to take Waldner's (2005) example), they hardly are causal explanations”
From Qualitative Comparative Analysis: How Inductive Use and Measurement Error Lead to Problematic Inference (2013) · cites this paper as Waldner (2005)
On p. 28, Waldner argues that an observed association alone does not establish a causal relationship, supporting the sentence’s general point. But he uses course registration as an example of a necessary condition with an identified causal process—the administrative rule—not as a condition that merely goes hand in hand with an A. The passage does not address matching an inductive theory’s scope to the countries studied. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
After KKV: The New Methodology of Qualitative Research
Mahoney, J. (2010) · World Politics · doi:10.1017/s0043887109990220 · Cited by 596
Hug, S. (2013) · Political Analysis · doi:10.1093/pan/mps061 · Cited by 137
Metadata
- Authors
- Waldner, D.
- Corresponding author
- Waldner, David
- ORCID
- Waldner, David
- Venue
- Zenodo
- Publisher
- Zenodo
- Published
- 2005-03-31
- OpenAlex
- W3000364928
- Cited by
- 2
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- zenodo.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Qualitative Comparative Analysis Research
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Political Science Research and Education
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy of Biology and Scientific Explanation
- Keywords
- necessary conditions, counterexample, measurement error, hypothesis testing, social science methodology
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
