ABSTRACT According to James Woodward’s manipulationism, to explain an event is to show how it could be changed by manipulating its cause. The relevant intervention must be a ‘serious possibility’, distinct from mere logical or physical possibility and approximating something I call ‘scientific possibility’. I argue that background knowledge is indispensable for judgements of scientific possibility and that ‘invariant’ generalisations, the primary vehicles of explanation in manipulationism, are not well adapted to encoding this often implicit knowledge, especially in the social sciences. A survey of key social scientific research methods (case and comparative studies, randomised control trials, ethnography, and structural equation modelling) shows that the output of these methods is generated by causal and non-causal background knowledge meshing in a way that is better encapsulated in an updated theory of ceteris paribus generalisations.

中文翻译：

---

操纵主义，塞特里斯·帕里布斯定律和背景知识的负担

摘要根据詹姆斯·伍德沃德（James Woodward）的操纵主义，解释一个事件就是表明如何通过操纵其原因来改变它。相关的干预必须是“严重的可能性”，不同于纯粹的逻辑或物理可能性，并且近似于我称之为“科学可能性”的东西。我认为背景知识对于科学可能性的判断是必不可少的，而“不变的”概括是操纵主义解释的主要手段，不适用于编码这种通常是隐性的知识，尤其是在社会科学中。对主要社会科学研究方法的调查（案例研究和比较研究，随机对照试验，人种志，