Mechanistic Reduction

I present a mechanistic explanation consistent with reduction-ism in economics. I claim that pure individualist explanations are, prima facie, a type of mechanistic reduction in economics or the social sciences. Economists may acknowledge the reality of other entities embedded in their explanations since the external stimuli that impinge on agents’ minds are correlated and, therefore, understandable in terms of agents’ interpretation. Positive reductive explanations enable a unified causal principle shared amongst dissimilar agents to explain macro phenomena and can be applied to theoretical and/or empirical models.