ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches out a metaphysical framework that supports the methodological views the author have been advocating about the importance of social scientific laws. Naturalism, in the metaphysical sense, is a view about ontological dependence between phenomena at different levels of organization. It is a hierarchical view about the dependency and determinative relationships that hold between things "as such", where relationships at secondary levels of organization, for instance, are dependent upon relationships at the primary level. In his account of reductionism given in The Structure of Science, Ernest Nagel has highlighted the relevant issues. According to Nagel, Reduction is the explanation of a theory or a set of experimental laws established in one area of inquiry, by a theory usually though not invariably formulated for some other domain. Supervenience seems to have originated in the field of ethics. Jaegwon Kim stops to consider the difference between two different types of supervenience relationships: weak and strong.
