Proportionality and Nonreductive Explanations in the Social Sciences

Building upon the notion of proportionality, this article proposes a line of argument in favor of nonreductive explanations in the social sciences. I argue that many higher-level explanations in the social sciences, i.e., explanations over and above the individual-level, are legitimate explanations insofar as their explanantia are proportional to their given explananda of interest. These higher-level explanations are often favored over their individual-level reductive counterparts because they are strictly more informative than their reductive counterparts.