think-process-tracing

Evaluates rival causal explanations of a single case by typing each piece of within-case evidence by its diagnosticity (hoop, smoking-gun, straw-in-the-wind, doubly-decisive tests) against each rival's mechanism chain, then eliminating or confirming rivals item by item rather than by tallying. Use when one outcome has happened, several genuine rival explanations compete to explain it, and mechanism-level evidence…