SOCIAL CAUSALITY AND EMPIRICAL DATA REDUCTION TECHNIQUES.

The aim of this article is to investigate the relationships between causality and path and regression analysis. It could be maintained that path analysis is a technique used in the causal analysis of phenomena by means of linear relations. The aim of the article is to show that the connection between causality and path analysis is far from obvious. Although there is an enormous amount of different definitions of causality or causal relation, most of them take as their point of departure the concepts of necessary and sufficient condition. According to regularity theory, in order to be entitled to say that a causal connection obtains among phenomena one has to show that a universal law connects the phenomena. There is, however, a logical possibility to conceptualize causality independently of law concept. The theories of causality can be classified according to the form of description of relations. The relations can be described as deterministic or as stochastic. The article also discusses causality as a mode of determination in the social sciences.