Max Weber's Defense of Historical Inquiry

Wesleyan University

Max Weber's Defense of Historical InquiryAuthor(s): Lelan McLemoreReviewed work(s):Source: History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Oct., 1984), pp. 277-295Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505076 .Accessed: 18/05/2012 18:08

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MAX WEBER'S DEFENSE OF HISTORICAL INQUIRY

LELAN McLEMORE

I

That there are differences between social and natural phenomena is hardly a matter of dispute, and there is little question that these differences result from the role of "subjective states" such as purposes, attitudes, and beliefs in human affairs. The important question is not whether these differences exist but whether they lead to fundamental differences between the natural and social sciences. As Bhaskar notes, this is the "primal question of the philosophy of the social sciences" and it has dominated the social sciences since their birth.1 The ardently contested issues raised by the question of the relationship between the social and natural sciences have permeated the social-scientific disciplines in disputes that have decisively shaped their development.2 Perhaps it is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that differences between the various "schools" within the social sciences are reducible to the different ways these issues have been resolved.

The framework for discussion of these issues was in large measure the work of Max Weber. This is not surprising from a thinker labeled "the last universal genius of the social sciences"3 by an admirer and "the greatest social scientist of our century"4 by one of his harshest critics. Although Weber's interest in methodological issues was secondary and his writings on the subject usually polemical, the erudition and insight with which he analyzed the character of the social sciences have commanded continuing attention. This attention has focused primarily on Weber's insistence that the susceptibility of social phenomena to interpretative understanding radically distinguishes them from natural phenomena and creates a unique task for the social sciences. This alone, however, says nothing about the relationship between the social and natural sciences, and no aspect of Weber's thought has been more controversial or more variously construed than the nature of interpretative understanding and its significance for the logic of sociocultural inquiry.5

1. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979), 1. 2. An interesting discussion of what is at stake for sociology in these issues is found in chapter

2 of Piotr Sztompka, Sociological Dilemmas: Toward a Dialectical Paradigm (New York, 1979). 3. Max Weber, ed. Dennis Wrong (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 1. 4. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), 36. 5. Several of the readings basic to this controversy are contained in Understanding and Social

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Much of the controversy over Weber's conception of the social sciences and their relation to the natural sciences is a consequence of overlooking the task which gave rise to his methodological reflections. Weber was principally an historian, and it is perhaps too little appreciated that the primary aim of his early methodological writings was to defend the status of historical inquiry. Weber's early research was historical, and his methodological views were developed in a series of essays published during a three-year period that also in- cluded publication of his best known historical work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Whether or not Tenbruck's judgment is accepted that "the Objectivity essay ... was ... written essentially as a methodological justification for the P[rotestant] E[thic],"6 there is little doubt that Weber's con- tributions to the Methodenstreit were stimulated by reflection on his own prac- tice as an historian.7 In addition to the Objectivity essay (1904), published the same year as his work on the Protestant ethic, Weber's monographs criticizing Roscher (1903), Knies (1905-1906), Meyer (1906), and Stammler (1907) all dealt with problems of historical inquiry. Despite Weber's growing later interest in sociology, there is nothing in his subsequent thought inconsistent with the position worked out in these essays. Indeed, as Wolfgang Mommsen has quite rightly observed, Weber "remained faithful throughout his life to the methodological position which he had taken up between 1903 and 1907."8

A defense of historical inquiry was required because historical explanations appear to differ from explanations in the exact natural sciences in two critical respects: they are not derived from causal laws and they purport to explain by reference to that which is said to be interpretatively understood. The strategy of Weber's defense is to place historical explanations within a broader conception of the sciences, one largely inherited from Rickert,9 and to demonstrate their logical identity with explanations of natural events; in his view, explanations of social events have the same structure and scientific standing as explanations of concrete natural events. Interpretative understanding (Verstehen), from this perspective, is seen as having an essential role in the explanation of socio-

Inquiry, ed. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1977). See also Verstehen: Subjective Understanding in the Social Sciences, ed. Marcello Turzzi (Reading, Mass., 1974).

6. Frederich H. Tenbruck, "The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber," British Journal of Sociology 31 (1980), 348, n. 20.

7. An excellent brief account of the primary issues in the Methodenstreit is found in Guy Oakes's introduction to Max Weber, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Eco- nomics, transl. Guy Oakes (New York, 1975); cited hereafter as Roscher and Knies. A more detailed account is found in Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).

8. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber (New York, 1975), 11.

9. Rickert's influence on Weber has been disputed since the latter's death. The excellent work by Thomas Burger (Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation [Durham, N.C., 1976]) goes far in detailing Weber's indebtedness to Rickert. Burger's work is basic to future studies of Weber's methodological writings.

MAX WEBER'S DEFENSE OF HISTORICAL INQUIRY 279

cultural phenomena, but not one that distinguishes the logic of sociocultural explanations from explanations of natural phenomena.

Central to Weber's analysis of the sociocultural sciences and the role of interpretative understanding within them, therefore, is the relationship he sees between these sciences and the natural sciences. He emphasizes the distinctive character of social phenomena, but by locating the differentiation between the social and natural sciences within a more fundamental division of the sciences he is able to accentuate similarities between studies of social and natural phenomena. In this essay I want to examine this more fundamental division of the sciences and its consequences for the sociocultural sciences. More specifically, I want to clarify Weber's understanding of the relationship between the sociocultural and natural sciences and by doing so specify more precisely the role of interpretative understanding in his conception of the sociocultural sciences.

II

For Weber, differences in subject matter do not distinguish between the logic of the natural and cultural sciences.10 Instead, following Rickert, he finds the fundamental division among the sciences to be between those directed toward the development of causal laws and those seeking knowledge of concrete events. Although the existing scientific disciplines, with a few exceptions, are in fact concerned with both causal laws and the explanation of concrete phenomena, the difference between the nomological sciences and the sciences of concrete reality is a radical one for Weber."1 The study of concrete reality is said to be "entirely different from the analysis of reality in terms of laws and general concepts. Neither of these two types of the analysis of reality has any necessary logical relationship with the other."12

The distinction between the nomological sciences and the sciences of concrete reality rests upon the logic of concept construction, a logic that is decisive for Weber. Following the neo-Kantian tradition, Weber regards concepts as "analytic instruments for the mastery of empirical data."'13 Scientific concepts are never copies of reality, but are abstractions through which portions of reality are selectively reconstructed. Abstraction is necessary because of the infinitude of reality:

as soon as we attempt to reflect about the way in which life confronts us in immediate concrete situations, it presents an infinite multiplicity of successively and coexistingly

10. Roscher and Knies, 185. 11. Weber more or less consistently used the expression "science of concrete reality" (Wirklich-

keitswissenschaft) rather than "idiographic science" to designate studies investigating the unique characteristics of particular phenomena. Nevertheless, I will use these two expressions interchange- ably in this essay.

12. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, transl. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York, 1949), 77. Italics added. This work is cited hereafter as Methodology.

13. Ibid., 106.

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emerging and disappearing events, both "within" and "outside" ourselves. The absolute infinitude of this infinity is seen to remain undiminished even when our attention is focused on a single "object" . . . as soon as we seriously attempt an exhaustive description of all the individual components of this "individual phenomena," to say nothing of explaining it causally. All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is "important" in the sense of being "worthy of being known.""14

Concept formation, then, involves selecting from the infinitude of reality what is worth knowing, that is, what we want to know about reality. What we want to know, according to Weber, is either the common properties of a set of phenomena or the peculiar features of a particular phenomenon.15 This difference leads to two quite distinct methods of concept formation. The first conceptualizes the generic features of phenomena while the second conceptualizes the unique characteristics of particular phenomena; concept formation, in Thomas Burger's succinct phrase, moves "either away from or toward concrete reality."" For Weber as for Rickert, there is no logically necessary link between the object domain of a science and the type of concepts it uses. The distinction between the meaningfulness of sociocultural phenomena, their susceptibility to interpretative understanding, and the meaninglessness of natural phenomena has no bearing whatsoever. The way in which conceptualization proceeds depends solely upon the theoretical aims of a science, what that science judges "worthy of being known."

The exact natural sciences, and any inquiry whose logical ideal is nomological knowledge, ask questions about the generic features of phenomena and seek to discover causal laws through a process of increasing generalization. "What is worthy of being known" for these sciences is "the 'regular' recurrence of certain causal relationships."17 These sciences, therefore, seek to identify commonalities among ever-expanding numbers of phenomena by ignoring their unique characteristics, which are treated as accidental. Abstracting from concrete phenomena, general concepts are developed which lend themselves to further abstraction into systematic conceptual hierarchies capable of providing deductive explanations. Interest in particular events is secondary, since they only serve as means for the development of causal laws or as instantiations of such laws.18 Precision, conceptual clarity, and deductive explanation are ob- tained, but at the loss of knowledge of particular events.

In consequence, the results of these sciences become increasingly remote from the properties of empirical reality. Empirical reality is invariably perceptual and accessible to our experience only in its concretely and individually qualitative peculiarities. In the last analysis, the product of these sciences is a set of absolutely non-qualitative -and there-

14. Ibid., 72. 15. Roscher and Knies, 56-57. 16. Burger, Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation, 77. 17. Methodology, 72. 18. Ibid., 86.


fore absolutely imaginary -conceptual entities which undergo changes that can only be described quantitatively, changes the laws of which can be formulated in equations that express causal relations. The definitive logical instrument of these disciplines is the use of concepts of an increasingly universal extension. For just this reason, these concepts become increasingly empty in content. The definitive logical products of these disciplines are abstract relations of general validity (laws).19

Because sciences of concrete reality are interested in knowing about particular phenomena rather than in what phenomena have in common, concept formation in them proceeds in a quite different manner. These sciences ask questions about the peculiar characteristics of individual phenomena and are therefore concerned with conceptualizing those aspects of phenomena dis- regarded by the nomological sciences. Hence, as Weber argues in his dispute with Meyer over the character of historical explanation, "the meaning of history as a science of reality can only be that it treats particular elements of reality not merely as heuristic instruments but as the objects of knowledge, and particular causal connections not as premises of knowledge but as real causal factors."20 Abstraction takes place in a way that captures rather than disregards what is unique to the particular phenomenon studied. The aim is to:

differentiate the essential properties of the concrete phenomenon subjected to analysis from its "accidental" or meaningless properties, and thereby to establish intuitive knowledge of these essential features.... These concepts are meant to approximate a representation of the concrete actuality of reality by selecting and unifying those properties which we regard as "characteristic."21

Like generalizing concepts, individualizing concepts involve abstraction. They are not mirrors of reality.22 Because of the infinite number of aspects of any particular phenomenon, individualizing concepts necessarily involve a selection of aspects and their mental reconstruction into what Weber calls "historical individuals." In other words, individualizing concepts are constructs developed with particular purposes in mind. The character of these constructs is well illustrated in Weber's discussion of the concept of "the spirit of capitalism":

If any object can be found to which this term can be applied with any understandable meaning, it can only be an historical individual, i.e., a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance.

Such an historical concept, however, since it refers in its content to a phenomenon significant for its unique individuality, cannot be defined according to the formula genus proximum, differentia specifica, but it must be gradually put together out of the individual parts which are taken from historical reality to make it up.... This is the necessary result of the nature of historical concepts which attempt for their methodological purposes not to grasp historical reality in abstract general formulae, but in con-

19. Roscher and Knies, 56-57. 20. Methodology, 135. 21. Roscher and Knies, 57. 22. Ibid., 173.

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crete genetic sets of relations which are inevitably of a specifically unique and individual character.

Despite the fundamental differences between the nomological sciences and the sciences of concrete reality and the absence of any "necessary logical relations" between them, both pursue objectively valid causal explanations. It is their capacity to produce such explanations that warrants labeling both as sciences. As Aron has noted, for Weber "genuine science is causal explanation."24 While Weber seems to take it for granted that scientific explanations are always causal explanations, he rejects the claim that there is a single logical form for causal explanations. Instead, he argues that the nomological sciences and the sciences of concrete reality use the concept of causality differently and that this different usage can alter the meaning of the concept itself.

In the Knies essay Weber analyzes these different uses by distinguishing between two aspects of the notion of causality: "the idea of an 'effect,' the idea of a dynamic bond . . . between phenomena qualitatively different from one another" and "the idea of subordination to 'rules."'25 The first refers to the Hu- mean notion that in a causal relationship cause and effect must always refer to different phenomena. Although Weber does not explicitly clarify the notion of a "dynamic bond," he seems to have in mind an actual connection between phenomena by which one is compelled or produced by the other. The second aspect points to the need for lawlike generalizations regarding regular recurrence for the determination of causal relationships and to causal explanation by subsumption.

If either of these two aspects of causality is carried to its logical extreme, the other loses its meaning and the concept of causality is changed. If, in the interest of generality, the nomological sciences are led to the highest levels of abstraction, causal relations are translated into mathematical formulae and the concept of causality is transformed into the notion of causal equivalence in which the distinction between cause and effect is lost:

The "effect," the substantive content of the category of causality, invariably loses its meaning and disappears whenever, in the interest of quantified abstraction, the mathematical equation is established as the expression of purely spatial causal relations. Under these conditions, the concept of "cause" also loses its meaning.26

If, on the other hand, the individuality of a phenomenon is carried to its extreme, causal generalizations can have no role whatsoever in causal explanations; no generalization can subsume that which is seen in its "absolute qualitative uniqueness." Under these circumstances the notion of causality can be

23. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, transl. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1930), 47-48.

24. Raymond Aron, German Sociology, transl. Mary and Thomas Bottomore (Glencoe, Ill., 1964), 82.

25. Roscher and Knies, 195. 26. Idem. Weber's view here is surprisingly similar to that found in Bertrand Russell's well

known "On the Notion of Cause," in Mysticism and Logic (New York, 1929), 180-208.


preserved, Weber argues, only as the assumption that "that which is utterly 'novel' in every temporal differential 'must' have developed out of the 'past' in one and only one way."27 What is preserved, in other words, is the assumption necessary for science that whatever occurs had to occur because of antecedent conditions.

Weber insists that concrete events "can never be exhaustively 'deduced' from exclusively 'nomological' knowledge."28 This is true of natural as well as sociocultural phenomena. If, for example, we want to know why a particular tree (for example, the elm outside my office) is shaped precisely as it is and not in some other way, the concrete conditions under which this tree has grown (soil type, rainfall, temperature, and so on) must be examined; a deductive account of this tree's particular shape cannot be provided by the nomological sciences concerned with highly abstracted components of reality.

Where the individuality of a phenomenon is concerned, the question of causality is not a question of laws but of concrete causal relationships; it is not a question of subsumption of the event under some general rubric as a representative case but of its imputation as a consequence of some constellation. It is in brief a question of imputation.29

Weber is equally insistent, however, that generalizations and nomological knowledge play a necessary role in causally explaining concrete events.30 In- deed, he argues that causal imputation in the absence of causal generalizations "would in general be impossible."31 Since both aspects of causality play a role in explaining concrete events, Weber concludes that it is the sciences of concrete reality, rather than the nomological sciences, that use the concept of causality "in its full meaning." The sciences of concrete reality

conceive the circumstances and changes within concrete reality as "effected" and as "effective." In part, they attempt to establish "causal generalizations" by abstracting from the concrete properties of a complex. In part, they attempt to "explain" concrete "causal" complexes on the basis of these "generalizations."32

The important point is that while Weber denies that concrete events can be deduced from causal laws, he insists that they can be causally explained. In other words, Weber distinguishes between causal laws and the principle of causality and rejects the "wrongheaded view . . . that 'scientific knowledge' is identical with the 'discovery of laws."'33 Relying on the principle of causality, the sciences of concrete reality seek to provide causal explanations by dis- covering the "dynamic bond" between phenomena, a task aided by causal laws but quite unlike that of nomological deduction. The validity of a causal expla-

27. Roscher and Knies, 196. 28. Idem. 29. Methodology, 78-79. 30. See, for example, his discussion of adequate causation in Methodology, 177ff. 31. Ibid., 79. 32. Roscher and Knies, 194. 33. Methodology, 163, n. 30.

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nation of a concrete event depends upon the evidence available rather than upon the capacity to subsume that event under a law.34

It might be argued that Weber ignores the fact that nomological deduction always involves the specification of boundary conditions. But Weber might agree that the specification of boundary conditions is an essential part of nomological explanation and still deny that concrete phenomena can be causally explained by subsumption. It is because of their qualitative uniqueness that concrete events cannot be subsumed under causal laws; the applicability of a causal law with its specified boundary conditions to a particular event presupposes that the event is not unique. It is perhaps helpful here to recall that Hempel's influential essay on "The Function of General Laws in History" assumes that historical explanations concern not unique events, but types of events.35 If, as Weber believes, the object domain of history (or any other science) is made up of unique configurations, Hempel's argument loses whatever force it might otherwise have. Furthermore, for Weber the examination of (boundary) conditions surrounding a concrete event is itself an empirical undertaking requiring the use not of general concepts and causal laws but of individualizing concepts and causal imputation. The real work of the sciences of concrete reality is in empirically examining numerous conditions and weighing their relative impact on the phenomenon to be explained.36

Weber concedes that, unlike nomological explanations, explanations of concrete events will seldom be able to develop explanatory propositions of strict causal necessity.37 Because any concrete phenomenon contains an infinite number of components "an exhaustive causal investigation of any concrete phenomena in its full reality is not only practically impossible-it is simply nonsense."38 In explaining a concrete event the best that can be done usually is to show that there are insufficient grounds for the event and that the postu- lated relationship between these grounds and the event is not inconsistent with nomological laws. Using the notion of objective possibility, investigations of concrete phenomena, cultural or natural, seek to demonstrate causal ade-

34. Ibid., 159; Roscher and Knies, 170-171. 35. Reprinted in Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York, 1965), 231-243.

Surprisingly, Weber's writings were ignored during the extended discussions aroused by Hempel's article. The insularity of these discussions is evidenced by the fact that in Patrick Gardiner's well- known collection of readings (Theories of History [Glencoe, Ill., 1959]) there is, according to the index, only a single mention of Weber but nine of Sir Isaac Newton.

36. This is well demonstrated in Weber's discussion of objective possibility in Methodology, 173ff. Weber's position is, I think, strikingly similar to that developed later by William Dray in Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford, 1957) in the debate over covering laws in historical explanation. Dray argues against Hempel that any law capable of deductively explaining an historical event must be so qualified and amended by the specification of boundary conditions that the resulting law is such that only a single case can be subsumed under it. That the empirical determination of precise boundary conditions is the task of historians is noted by Maurice Mandelbaum in "Histor- ical Explanation: The Problem of 'Covering Laws,"' History and Theory 1 (1961), 229-242.

37. Roscher and Knies, 125. 38. Methodology, 78.


quacy.39 Although "this is an extremely imprecise form of causal explanation" it is sufficient for the task of explaining concrete events.40 For Weber, demonstration of strict causal necessity is not the goal of all scientific investigation and, in any case, the scientific validity of a causal explanation does not depend on it.41

III

To the distinction between the sciences pursuing nomological explanation and those directed toward the explanation of concrete phenomena Weber adds a distinction based on the subject matter of the sciences: "in the social sciences we are concerned with psychological and intellectual (geistig) phenomena the empathetic understanding of which is naturally a problem of a specifically different type from those which the schemes of the exact natural sciences in general can or seek to solve."42 Explicitly differing from Rickert, Weber argues that interpretative understanding "is the definitive criterion which justifies us in classifying together into a special group of sociocultural sciences all those disciplines which employ these interpretations for methodological purposes."43 Social actors have motives, reasons, and purposes through which they give meanings to their actions, meanings that create and sustain the sociocultural world. Because these meanings are essential to the sociocultural world, the task of the sociocultural sciences, a task quite unlike that of the natural sciences, is "that of interpreting the meaning which men give to their actions and so understand the actions themselves."44 It is only by attending to the meanings that actors ascribe to their actions that access to the sociocultural world can be ob- tained. Hence in his criticism of Stammler, Weber describes an exchange between two persons and notes:

We are inclined to think that a mere description of what can be observed during this exchange -muscular movements and, if some words were "spoken," the sounds which, so to say, constitute the "matter" or "material" of the behavior -would in no sense com- prehend the "essence" of what happens. This is quite correct. The "essence" of what happens is constituted by the "meaning" which the two parties ascribe to their observ- able behavior, a "meaning" which "regulates" the course of their future conduct. Without this "meaning," we are inclined to say, an "exchange" is neither empirically possible nor conceptually imaginable.45

39. A very helpful discussion of the notions of objective possibility and adequate causation is found in H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honor, Causation in the Law (Oxford, 1959), chap. 17.

40. Roscher and Knies, 123. 41. Ibid., 197; Methodology, 128. 42. Methodology, 74. 43. Roscher and Knies, 218, n. 22. 44. Max Weber, "The Nature of Social Action," in Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W. G.

Runciman, transl. Eric Matthews (Cambridge, England, 1978), 11. This is taken by Runciman from chapter 1 of Economy and Society and is cited hereafter as "Social Action."

45. Max Weber, Critique of Stammler, transl. Guy Oakes (New York, 1977), 109. Cited hereafter as Stammler.

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There is no inconsistency between this classification of the sciences on the basis of their subject matter and the distinction between nomological and the idiographic sciences. On the basis of their object domains Weber has distin- guished between the sociocultural sciences and the natural sciences, a distinction that overlays the more fundamental division between the sciences of concrete reality and the nomological sciences. Those sciences seeking nomological knowledge construct generic concepts and those aimed at the explanation of concrete events fashion individualizing concepts, but any science of the sociocultural world, whether it pursues generalizations or knowledge of concrete events, must employ interpretative understanding. A generalizing sociocultural science (such as economics) relies upon interpretative understanding just as a science of concrete social phenomena (such as history) uses interpretative understanding to study particular events. And, of course, no science of nature, nomological (such as mechanics) or idiographic (such as historical geology), can possibly use interpretative understanding.

Although there is no inconsistency, the divisions between the nomological and idiographic sciences, on the one hand, and the natural and cultural sciences, on the other, have often led to confusions for interpreters of Weber's thought. This confusion stems from focusing on only one of these divisions and consequently paying insufficient attention to precisely what is being com- pared in the numerous contrasts between the natural and sociocultural sciences that are scattered throughout Weber's methodological essays. Most frequently in the early methodological essays, and most often misleading, the contrast is between nomological natural science and idiographic cultural science. These contrasts typically concern the nature of the historical disciplines and reflect Weber's interest in vindicating the scientific status of historical inquiry. The point of these comparisons is to show that history cannot emulate the nomological natural sciences; history is intrinsically interested in individual phenomena and what is essential to the individuality of a phenomenon cannot be derived from causal laws. Hence these comparisons stress the role of value- relevance in constituting the objects of sociocultural investigation -thereby ac- counting for their individuality -and in the character of causal imputation in the absence of nomological deduction.

If these comparisons of nomological natural science and idiographic cultural science are read as comparing the study of natural and cultural phenomena, Weber's conception of the role of value-relevance-and consequently the problem of objectivity-in the sociocultural sciences is likely to be misunder- stood.46 Perhaps the most serious misunderstanding that arises is the claim that

46. These comparisons might also give the impression (cf. W. G. Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science [Cambridge, England, 1972], 61) that causal generalizations concerning meaningful behavior are either impossible or unnecessary. Neither is the case. Causal imputation is necessary in the cultural sciences not because of the impossibility of generalizations about meaningful conduct but because concrete phenomena, meaningful or meaningless, cannot be explained by subsumption. Nevertheless, Weber explicitly notes the possibility of developing valid generalizations about meaningful behavior; see, for example, his comments on social psy-


for Weber value-relevance plays a distinctive role in the cultural sciences because of the nature of cultural phenomena. Although common among Weber's sympathizers as well as his critics, the claim is mistaken. Runciman's assertion, for example, that Weber believes "the social sciences are concerned with events, objects or states of a kind to which the possibility of evaluation inherently at- taches" is simply false, as is Parsons's similar claim.47

Weber is, of course, interested in the role of value-relevance in the sociocultural sciences, and believes it to be unimportant in the natural sciences, whose logical ideal is nomological knowledge. And, admittedly, Weber is un- systematic and often unclear in discussing the place of value relevance in the sciences. Nevertheless, an examination of his infrequent comparisons of idiographic natural science and idiographic sociocultural science indicates that the value-relevance of the objects studied-selecting and conceptualizing them from the viewpoint of their (value) significance -is an attribute of any science that seeks knowledge about the unique, nonrepeatable characteristics of phenomena. Weber is quite clear on this point:

The logical peculiarity of "historical" knowledge in contrast to "natural-scientific" knowledge-in the logical sense of this expression-has nothing at all to do with the distinction between the "psychical" and the "physical," with the "personality" and "action," on the one hand, and the dead "natural object" and the "mechanical process of nature," on the other.... Physical and psychical "reality," or an aspect of "reality" comprehending both physical and psychical components, constitutes an "historical entity" because and insofar as it can "mean" something to us.48

Value-relevance is the logically necessary (implicit or explicit) criterion for selection any time particular individual phenomena are chosen for study, regard- less of the social or natural character of these phenomena. This is true because "without the investigator's evaluative ideas, there would be no principle of selection of subject-matter and no meaningful knowledge of the concrete reality."49 The following passage from the Objectivity essay, often misunder- stood as differentiating the cultural sciences from the natural sciences, is meant by Weber to characterize all inquiries into concrete phenomena:

Only a small portion of existing concrete reality is colored by our value-conditioned interest and alone is significant to us. It is significant because it reveals relationships which are important to us due to their connection with our values. Only because and to the extent that this is the case is it worthwhile for us to know it in its individual fea-

chology in Roscher and Knies, 246, n. 31. Weber's strictures regarding the role of causal generalizations in the cultural sciences pertain only to his belief that the significance of phenomena cannot be derived from causal laws (Methodology, 76), that nomological deduction is not descriptive of interpretative understanding (Roscher and Knies, 241, n. 24) and that "knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality" (Methodology, 80). None of this denies an important role to causal generalizations in the cultural sciences.

47. Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Science, 37; Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1949), 592-593, 596.

48. Roscher and Knies, 185. 49. Methodology, 82.

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tures. We cannot discover, however, what is meaningful to us by means of a "presupposi- tionless" investigation of empirical data. Rather perception of its meaningfulness to us is the presupposition of its becoming an object of investigation."

Value-relevance thus has nothing to do with the intrinsic character of the subject matter studied. That natural scientists do not study particular concrete phenomena "is not a consequence of the objective nature of natural phenomena. It is rather a consequence of the logical peculiarities of the theoretical goals of the natural sciences."51 Nevertheless, whenever a concrete natural phenomenon is the object of study its selection necessarily rests upon its value-relevance. Hence, in his discussion of astronomy as an alleged model for the cultural sciences Weber notes that astronomy is interested in our particular solar system because of its significance to us: astronomy "concerns itself with the question of the individual consequences which the working of these laws [of mechanics] in a unique configuration produces, since it is these individual configurations which are significant for us."52 In the Meyer essay Weber makes this point more forcefully in a brief discussion of Roentgen's discovery of X- rays. He observes that the particular X-rays seen in Roentgen's laboratory are unimportant to the natural scientists except "as the ground for inferring certain 'laws' of the occurrence of events."53 But in an important footnote he adds that these particular X-rays would be important if our interest in them was directed toward the causal explanation of a particular cultural or natural phenomenon significant to us:

It is clear that the logical status of those rays would, in this context, be completely changed. This is possible because these events play a role here which is rooted in values ("the progress of science"). It might perhaps be asserted that this logical distinction is only a result of having moved into the area of the subject matter of the "Geisteswissen- schaften," that the cosmic effects of those particular rays have therefore been left out of consideration. It is, however, irrelevant whether the particular "evaluated" object for which these rays were causally "significant" is "physical" or "psychic" in nature, provided only that it "means" something for us, i.e., that it is "evaluated." Once we assume the factual possibility of knowledge directed towards that object, the particular cosmic (physical, chemical, etc.) effects of those particular rays could (theoretically) become "historical facts" - but only if- lines of causation led from them to some particular result which was an "historical individual," i.e., was "evaluated" by us as universally significant in its particular individual character (individuellen Eigenart).54

Falsely locating the role of value-relevance in the context of the distinction between the natural and social sciences rather than in the division between the nomological and idiographic sciences results in a misleading view of Weber's

50. Ibid., 76. David Goddard is one of the many commentators who read this passage as distinguishing between the social and natural sciences. Note what he omits with ellipses in quoting from it. David Goddard, "Max Weber and the Objectivity of Social Science," History and Theory 12

(1973), 12. 51. Roscher and Knies, 217, n. 22. 52. Methodology, 73. 53. Ibid., 133. 54. Ibid., 134, n. 16.


formulation of the problem of objectivity in sociocultural sciences. Although this complex and vexatious problem is outside the scope of this essay, two points should be noted in light of the prior analysis.

The first is that for Weber the degree to which value-relevance affects the objectivity of social scientific explanations is neither greater nor lesser than the effects it has on explanations of concrete natural phenomena. From his point of view, any demonstration that the objectivity of sociocultural science is tainted with subjectivity because of the value-relevance of its object domain will ipso facto demonstrate the same taint in explanations of concrete natural phenomena. When Weber speaks of the impossibility of an "'objective' scientific analysis of culture . . . independent of special and 'one-sided' view- points according to which ... they are selected, analyzed, and organized for ex- pository purposes,"55 this has nothing to do with the nature of social phenomena, but is instead a consequence of what he took to be the aim of the sociocultural sciences. This aim locates them squarely within the sciences of concrete reality: "The type of social science in which we are interested is an empirical science of concrete reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft)."56 Sociocultural explanations are always explanations of concrete phenomena and for Weber they are in no respect inferior to explanations of concrete natural phenomena. Causal knowledge in the cultural sciences is said to be "entirely causal knowledge exactly in the same sense as the knowledge of significant concrete (in- dividueller) natural events which have a qualitative character."57 Furthermore,

This imputation of causes is made with the goal of being, in principle, "objectively" valid as empirical truth absolutely in the same sense as any proposition at all of empirical knowledge. Only the adequacy of the data decides the question, which is wholly factual, and not a matter of principle, as to whether the causal analysis attains this goal to the degree which explanations do in the field of concrete natural events.58

The second point concerns the sometimes puzzling fact that Weber views value-relevance as essential to all the sociocultural sciences but not to the nomological natural sciences. Is there not, as Weber's critics have alleged, an inconsistency here?59 The natural world is no less infinite than the cultural world, and natural scientists too must choose their subject matter from an infinitude; their choices reflect their values just as choices of subject matter reflect the cultural scientist's values. Weber errs, therefore, in failing to see that value-relevance is, in Parsons's words, "applicable to both groups of sciences, not to one alone."60 This charge can be sustained only by misconstruing the log-

55. Ibid., 72. 56. Idem. 57. Ibid., 82. 58. Ibid., 159. 59. Cf. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, 70-71; Parsons, Structure of Social Action,

595-601; Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York, 1961), 485-487; Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Be- havioral Science (San Francisco, 1964), 381.

60. Parsons, Structure of Social Action, 597.

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ical connection between value-relevance and the study of concrete phenomena as a contingent connection between scientists' motives and their fields of study. Weber's point, however, is not reducible to the commonplace that scientists choose problems on the basis of what interests them and what they judge to be important. As Habermas has noted, value-relevance "is not related in the first place to the choice of scientific problems, but to the constitution of possible objects of cultural-scientific knowledge."6' To see the differences in the role of value-relevance in the cultural and natural sciences as rooted in "the subjective directions of interests of the scientists in each of the groups of sciences"62 is to psychologize what for Weber is a transcendental claim about the logic of concept formation in the sciences.

The nomological sciences, it will be recalled, seek to develop increasingly abstract general concepts because they are concerned with "that set of problems in which the essential features of phenomena -the properties of phenomena which are worth knowing -are identical with their genericfeatures."63 The goal of developing increasingly general concepts, then, is the criterion guiding the abstractive process in which portions of the infinitude of reality are selected in concept formation. This selection, in other words, is made by asking what ever- increasing numbers of phenomena have in common. Value-relevance hence has no part in concept formation in the nomological sciences: the sole function of value-relevance is to select what is worth knowing in the process of concept formation and in the nomological sciences this function is fulfilled completely by the aim offormulating "concepts of an increasing universal extension."64 If, on the other hand, a particular concrete phenomenon is to be the object of knowledge, generality cannot possibly be the criterion for the selection involved in the abstractive process of conceptualization. Instead, this selection must necessarily be guided by value-relevance because "only through the presupposition that a finite part alone of the infinite variety of phenomena is significant, does the knowledge of an individual phenomenon become logically meaningful."65

Value-relevance would in fact play no role in a nomological cultural science and it is precisely for this reason that Weber rejects such a science. Sociocul- tural sciences such as sociology and economics can formulate useful, even in- dispensable, empirical generalizations, but these generalizing sciences are not thereby nomological sciences. While not denying that a nomological cultural science is possible, Weber questions whether such a science could "make any

61. Jirgen Habermas in Max Weber and Sociology Today, ed. Otto Stammler, transl. Kathleen Morris (New York, 1971), 61. As is obvious from the text, I believe Habermas errs when he adds, "Otherwise a firm distinction could not be made between natural and the cultural sciences." Value- relevance is a transcendental condition for knowledge of any individual phenomenon; it alone does not make "a firm distinction" between the study of cultural and natural phenomena. Habermas's claim would be true only if it were possible to make a concrete natural entity an object of knowledge without value-relevance playing a part in the constitution of that entity as an object of study.

62. Parsons, Structure of Social Action, 595. 63. Roscher and Knies, 57. 64. Ibid., 56 and 64. 65. Methodology, 78.


contribution to the understanding of those aspects of cultural reality which we regard as worth knowing."66 By selecting from the infinitude of reality that which cultural phenomena have in common, the generic concepts of a nomological cultural science would overlook what is worth knowing about cultural reality.67 Weber's position is clear:

The significance of a configuration of cultural phenomena and the basis of this significance cannot . . . be derived and rendered intelligible by a system of analytical laws (Gesetzesbegriffen), however perfect it may be, since the significance of cultural events presupposes a value-orientation towards these events.68

This leads Weber to conclude that "knowledge of cultural events is inconceiv- able except on a basis of the significance which the concrete constellations of reality have for us in certain individual concrete situations."69

For this reason the concepts of the sociocultural sciences, including those that pursue generalizations, select not the common characteristics of cultural phenomena but those features judged significant and worth knowing. This is the function of ideal types. Despite Weber's efforts to follow Rickert's theory of concept formation, ideal types are neither individualizing nor generic concepts.70 Because they can be used to describe more than one phenomenon, ideal types are not individualizing concepts, but as with individualizing concepts the selectivity involved in the construction of ideal types is guided by the criterion of value-relevance. In other words, judgments of what is significant underlie the construction of ideal types. Ideal types therefore permit the description of cultural events in a way that reveals their significance: any effort "to determine the cultural significance of even the simplest individual event in order to 'characterize' it, must use concepts which are precisely and unambiguously definable only in the form of ideal types."71 Although ideal types are not individualizing concepts, Weber is careful to differentiate them from generic concepts. Unlike the aim in constructing generic concepts, "the goal of ideal typical concept construction is to make clearly explicit not the class or average character but rather the unique individual character of cultural phenomena."72 Hence, ideal types are not "fitted to serve as a schema under which a real situation or action is to be subsumed as one instance."73 As a result, generalizations using ideal types cannot serve as covering laws for the causal explanation of events and the "generalizing" sociocultural sciences built upon the use of ideal types cannot be nomological sciences.

66. Roscher and Knies, 217, n. 22. 67. Methodology, 72ff.; cf. Roscher and Knies, 102. 68. Methodology, 76. 69. Ibid., 80. 70. That ideal types are neither individualizing nor generalizing concepts but a type of concept

developed by Weber to overcome logical defects in the epistemological framework inherited from Rickert is skillfully demonstrated by Burger, Weber's Theory of Concept Formation, 115-130.

71. Methodology, 92. See also Weber's discussion of historical individuals, ibid., 150ff. 72. Ibid., 101. 73. Ibid., 93.

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IV

What is striking about Weber's occasional comparisons between idiographic natural science and idiographic cultural science is the emphasis he places on their similarities. He notes a single important difference: interpretative understanding. Rather than an impediment to scientific explanation or an auxiliary methodological tool, interpretative understanding gives sociocultural explanation a decided advantage over explanations of concrete natural phenomena. In explaining a concrete natural event (for example, a particular hurricane) all that can be done is to examine empirically the preceding configuration of concrete events and conditions with the aim of imputing an adequate cause that is consistent with nomological knowledge.74 Through interpretative understanding the sociocultural sciences can go beyond this by making the connection between cause and effect directly intelligible. Unlike natural phenomena, "both the course of human conduct and also human expressions of every sort are sus- ceptible to a meaningful interpretation.... This sort of interpretation represents the possibility of transcending the 'given."'75 Whereas natural phenomena can only be observed, sociocultural phenomena can be understood. This means that:

In the analysis of human conduct, our criteria for causal explanation can be satisfied in a fashion which is qualitatively quite different [from analyses of concrete natural phenomena].... As regards the interpretation of human conduct, we can, at least in principle, set ourselves the goal not only of representing it as "possible" - "comprehensi- ble," in the sense of being consistent with our nomological knowledge. We can also attempt to "understand" it: that is, to identify a concrete "motive" or complex of motives "reproducible in inner experience," a motive to which we can attribute the conduct in question with a degree of precision that is dependent upon our source material. In other words, because of its susceptibility to a meaningful interpretation ... individual human conduct is in principle intrinsically less "irrational" than the individual natural event.76

This passage reveals the cardinal importance of interpretative understanding in Weber's conception of the sociocultural sciences. Interpretative understanding not only provides these sciences with access to their object domain; it plays a decisive role in their explanation of sociocultural events. For Weber, the category of causality "is constitutive to all sciences"77 and therefore the sociocultural sciences, if they are to be true sciences, must produce causal explanations. Interpretative understanding is the means by which they do this: "a historical 'interpretive' inquiry into motives is causal explanation in absolutely the same logical sense as the causal explanation of any concrete process."78

Human actions are caused by actors' motives and motives are knowable only through interpretative understanding. Interpretation, for this reason, "is a form of causal knowledge."79 "To Weber," as Albert Salomon has observed, "under-

74. Cf. Roscher and Knies, 122-124. 75. Ibid., 217-218, n. 22. 76. Ibid., 125. 77. Stammler, 73-74. 78. Roscher and Knies, 194. Second italics added. 79. Ibid., 155.


standing is synonymous with the discovery of causal relationships, or in other words with the imputation (Zurechnung) of concrete results to concrete causes."80 Because "'interpretation' .. . produces knowledge of causal relations,"'81 explanation and understanding are conjoined such that the latter is required by the former. This connection between explanation and understanding is made explicit in Weber's often quoted definition of sociology as "the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces."82

The sociocultural scientist understands and causally explains an action by locating it in the complex of meanings within which it empirically fits. Because motives can be understood, causal explanations in the sociocultural sciences have "a unique kind of satisfaction."83 By identifying the motives for an action, the "dynamic bond" between the actor's situation and his actions is made intelligible: "From our viewpoint, 'purpose' is the conception of an effect which be- comes a cause of an action."84 Or, as Weber argues in an early draft of the first chapter of Economy and Society, "understandable relationships and particu- larly rationally oriented sequences of motivation are . . . thoroughly qualified to act as links in a causal chain that begins, for example, with 'external' conditions and in the end leads again to 'external' behavior."85 Dennis Wrong is entirely correct, then, in arguing that for Weber, "goals and motives are 'inter- vening variables' which we cannot ignore in trying to establish the causal series leading to a given action."86

Because they seek causal knowledge, interpretative understanding is compul- sory for the sociocultural sciences: "our criteria for causal explanation require that whenever 'interpretation' is possible in principle, it should be under- taken."87 Without meaning adequacy, that is, the determination that a course of action is intelligible in terms of its motives, no generalization can provide sociocultural knowledge. The discovery, for example, of a statistical relationship between economic changes and the marriage rate tells us nothing about the sociocultural world unless "a genuinely positive causal interpretation in terms of 'motives' is produced."88 That which lies outside the domain of the interpretatively understandable is outside the scope of the sociocultural sciences:

Suppose that somehow an empirical-statistical demonstration of the strictest sort is produced, showing that all men everywhere who have ever been placed in a certain situation have invariably reacted in the same way and to the same extent. Suppose that whenever this situation is experimentally reproduced, the same reaction invariably follows....

80. Albert Salomon, "Max Weber's Methodology," Social Research 1 (1934), 159. 81. Roscher and Knies, 149. 82. "Social Action," 7. Italics added. 83. Roscher and Knies, 185. 84. Methodology, 83. 85. Max Weber, "Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology," transl. Edith E. Graber, Sociolog-

ical Quarterly 22 (1981), 157. 86. Max Weber, ed. Wrong, 21. 87. Roscher and Knies, 128. 88. Ibid., 126.

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Such a demonstration would not bring us a single step closer to the "interpretation" of this reaction. By itself, such a demonstration would contribute absolutely nothing to the project of "understanding" "why" this reaction ever occurred and, moreover, "why" it invariably occurs in the same way. As long as the "inner," imaginative reproduction of the motivation responsible for this reaction remains impossible, we will be unable to ac- quire this understanding. As long as this is not possible, it follows that even an ideally comprehensive empirical-statistical demonstration of the regular recurrence of a reaction will still fail to satisfy the criteria concerning the kind of knowledge which we ex- pect from history and those "sociocultural sciences" which are related to history in this respect.89

Weber does not deny that non-meaningful factors influence human conduct, nor that scientific inquiries into human behavior which ignore the meanings actors attach to their actions can produce valid generalizations, nor, finally, that the findings of these sciences are sometimes helpful in the explanation of sociocultural events. Nevertheless, he consistently denies that these sciences are sociocultural sciences. This denial is best illustrated in Weber's rejection of psychology or "psychophysics" as a sociocultural science. Unless the findings produced by psychology can be interpretatively understood, "they contribute nothing to the satisfaction of the specifically 'historical interest"'90 and are only "relevant in precisely the same sense as physical, meteorological, and biological knowledge."91

Meaning adequacy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a sociocultural explanation. An historical novel can be said to have meaning adequacy if the motives which guide the characters are intelligible to us, but because the novel is not based upon empirical evidence we make no claim that it accurately explains a real historical event. Likewise, sociocultural explanation in terms of motives without observational evidence "would remain a worthless construction as far as knowledge of real actions is concerned."92 In addition to meaning adequacy, then, sociocultural explanations must have causal adequacy. That is, it must be demonstrated that a particular hypothesized (on the basis of meaning adequacy) course of action did in fact occur or could be ex- pected to occur on the basis of empirical generalizations. Alone, neither meaning adequacy nor causal adequacy provide valid sociocultural explanations. A correct sociocultural explanation involves a conjunction of the two:

To give a correct causal interpretation of a particular action is to see the outward course of the action and its motive as appropriate and at the same time as related to each other in a way whose meaning can be understood.... Without adequacy on the level of meaning, our generalizations remain mere statements of statistical probability.... On the other hand, . . . even the most certain adequacy on the level of meaning signifies an acceptable causal proposition only to the extent that evidence can be produced that there is a probability (no matter how it may be calculated) that the action in question really takes the course held to be meaningfully adequate with a certain calculable fre- quency or some approximation to it.93

89. Ibid., 128-129. 90. Ibid., 142. 91. Ibid., 140; see also "Social Action," 22. 92. "Social Action," 14. 93. Ibid., 15.


And what if such evidence cannot be produced? "In these cases, the interpretation must in the end remain at the level of an 'hypothesis."'94

V

In its general outline, Weber's defense of historical inquiry is straightforward enough. What radically separates the sociocultural sciences from the exact natural sciences is the aim of explaining concrete events. The logic of sociocultural explanation is the logic of idiographic explanation, and a sociocultural explanation is in principle no less valid than the explanation of a concrete natural event: the impossibility of explanation by subsumption, the role of value- relevance in conceptualizing the object domain, the use of the categories of adequate causation and objective possibility in imputing causes, and the un- likelihood of demonstrating causal necessity are characteristic of any effort to gain knowledge of concrete phenomena. Historical explanations, hence, are like explanations of concrete natural events, but they have a critically important advantage and a corresponding obligation rooted in the distinctive character of their object domain. The sociocultural world is intrinsically meaningful and can be made an object of study only through the apprehension of its meaning by interpretatively understanding the meaning actors ascribe to their actions. Causal adequacy is all that is possible in explaining a concrete natural event, but sociocultural explanations can and must demonstrate meaning adequacy as well as causal adequacy by making the dynamic bond between cause and effect intelligible. In this way the sociocultural sciences are able to provide causal explanations.

Weber's defense of historical inquiry - as well as his conception of the sociocultural sciences - remains opaque unless his view of the structure of scientific knowledge is sufficiently taken into account. He located the differences based on subject matter within a broader framework built upon the logic of concept construction; differences in subject matter do not provide the most fundamental division of the sciences for him. Turning to Weber's methodological writings to ask about the relationship between the natural and social sciences is, by now, customary. And I believe that Weber offers at least a partial answer that is important. But his answer cannot be adequately understood so long as we fail to recognize that this is not precisely the question he was trying to answer and that, unlike many of his later interrogators, he did not presup- pose the division between the natural and social sciences to be primary.

Carroll College

94. Ibid., 14. Weber's positivist critics often ignore this point by suggesting that for Weber meaning adequacy is a sufficient condition for the explanation of action. Peter Winch, on the other hand, argues that Weber is wrong to believe that meaning adequacy must be conjoined with causal adequacy in explaining action. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London, 1958), 111-120.

Documents

Max Weber's Defense of Historical Inquiry