ABSTRACT
Although Evidential Pluralism arose out of a thesis of Russo and Williamson that was put forward in 2007, the interplay between correlation and mechanisms attracted some interest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this chapter, we explore some views that might be thought of as historical precursors of Evidential Pluralism, including the approaches of Claude Bernard, W.F.R. Weldon and John Goldthorpe. We also discuss some differences between Evidential Pluralism and analytic sociology, and some differences between Evidential Pluralism and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism.
