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STEEL, Daniel P. Across the Boundaries: Extrapolation in Biology and Social Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xi + 241 pp. Cloth, $65.00 - Daniel Steel expanded upon his dissertation to write Across the Boundaries, which Oxford has published as a part of their Environmental Ethics and Science Policy Series. The result is a very tightly argued and usefully theoretical selection for the series which is the first monograph on its chosen topic published to date.
Steel's focus in Across the Boundaries is to deal with the methodological problems associated with making extrapolations in the social sciences via a comparison with the manner in which extrapolation works in the biological sciences. Extrapolation is understood as inferential reasoning from one set of causal relationships into another distinct set, thus from one environment and situation into another.
Steel looks at various strategies for handling problems in extrapolation and the limitations of such a form of inductive reasoning. He focuses upon a mechanisms approach which "rests on the intuition that knowing how a cause produces its effect . . . can...