ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by contrasting the perspectives on "causal" explanation; and develops the differences at a theoretical level. It illustrates these differences in dealing with specific issues. This is followed by separate but related reflections on matters of theoretical generalization, methodological techniques, and the respective positions regarding how law figures into social change. The chapter addresses a host of specific points in Rosenberg's review and utilizes examples from his own well-known Hollow Hope to illustrate the differences. Social conventions and knowledges are understood as "constitutive"—rather than independent, exogenous, discrete determi-nants—of citizen meaning making activity. Positivist approaches tend to disaggregate complex processes of social change into scores of discrete causal connections between legal decisions and possible behavioral outcomes. Positivist models of causality not only oversimplify relations among thinking humans, as many interpretivists see it, but they thus also tend to overdetermine actions in ways that discount human agency.
