http://www.units.it/etica/2005_2/TURNER.htm
Center for Social and Political
Thought
Abstract Only a few writers have attempted to construct a comprehensive
philosophy of social science, and of these Weber is the most relevant to the
present. The structure of his conception places him in a close relationship
to Donald Davidson. The basic reasoning of Davidson on action explanation,
anomalous monism, and the impossibility of a “serious science” of psychology
is paralleled in Weber. There are apparent differences with respect to their
treatment of the status of the model of rational action and the problem of
other cultures, as well as the problem of the objectivity of values, but on
examination, these turn out to be less dramatic. Weber’s use of the notion of
ideal-types, though it is not paralleled as directly in Davidson, allows him
to make parallel conclusions about the relation of truth and interpretation:
both make the problem of intelligibility rather than correspondence with some
sort of external reality central, and each addresses, though in different
ways, the dependence of considerations of intelligibility on normativity and
the impossibility of a theory of meaning without idealization. |
Methodological
and philosophical writings about the social sciences are plagued by the eternal
recurrence, typically in slightly different guises, of the same issues: abstraction, rationality and its relevance to
causal explanation, the problem of cultural and historically specific
perspectives as a condition for constituting and defining topics and the
problem of reconciling this with claims to universality of knowledge, and
various other problems relating to the question of the a priori conditions of knowledge
itself, which in the social sciences often involves conflicting choices between
possible starting points. Dealing with
any of these complex issues as they relate to the polymorphous and pluralized
disciplinary and subject-matter worlds of the humanities and human sciences is
difficult. But attaining some sort of reasonable perspective on the relations
of these problems to one another, and in addition to the problem of the
relations between the human sciences and such related enterprises as the
natural sciences and the normative disciplines, for example law, is
overwhelmingly difficult.
The
thinkers who have attempted to deal with these problems by reductive
simplifications are numerous. The thinkers who have seriously attempted to deal
with all of them are few. One of them
was John Stuart Mill, and the tremendous influence of his major work on the
philosophy of social science, his System of Logic,
(1) testifies both to the
difficulty of the task, with which he only partially succeeded, and the rarity
with which it is attempted. Weber is perhaps the only other thinker who has
left a coherent response to these issues which deals with the relations between
these issues. Weber’s competitors in his own time, such as Durkheim, Pareto and
Karl Pearson, whose methodological ideas were transmitted and refined for
social science by Franklin Giddings in the
In what follows I will explain Weber’s views on each of
these issues and the ways he put them together.
In my conclusion, I will indicate some ways in which these issues remain
live problems and also why some of the favored present day solutions to these
problems in contemporary philosophy are inadequate or at least problematic. My
stalking horse in this discussion will be, perhaps surprisingly, Donald
Davidson, who is among the few contemporary philosophers to attempt to deal
with what is roughly the same range of problems, especially problems of the
nature of rationality as a model, the role of the normative in the constitution
of problems, including the problem of rationality, and the dubiousness of such
collective concepts as language. Davidson contrasts to Weber on these key
issues, issues which are important to present philosophy, and are especially
important in the interface between contemporary philosophy and the philosophy
of social science.
What
may seen odd about this discussion is that Davidson is an “analytic”
philosopher, while Weber is and has usually been understood in terms of
continental philosophy. The great works on Weber as a philosopher, such as
Bruun’s Science, Values and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (1971),
(2) Leo Strauss’s treatment
of Weber in Natural Right and History (1953),(3) or Schutz’s Phenomenology
of the Social World (1932),(4)
have generally taken Weber as a part of this tradition. But
today, especially in the light of Michael Friedman’s work on the origins of
Logical Positivism and on the parting of the ways between what became
“Continental” and “analytic” philosophy, (5) which occurred for the
most part after Weber wrote, these contrasts no longer have the categorical
meaning they once did. And the rise of rational-choice theorizing and its
application to Weber has closed the gap further: Richard von Mises’ “Austrian
Economics” critique of Weber, (6)
as we shall see, is as relevant today as ever– and the
issues over the status of the model of rational choice that arise with Mises
are also issues that are at the heart of the comparison to Davidson.
1. Reasons and Causes
Weber
understood at the outset that there was a fundamental conflict between the task
of understanding action and the task of causal explanation, but he also understood
that the conflict could not be resolved by collapsing one into the other. Reasons were not causes, at least in the
sense of cause as governed by scientific laws, if these were understood on
analogy with laws of chemistry, physics, or astronomy. The concepts we employ in the natural
sciences, are, so to speak, developed to fit and explain the irregularities
that science discovers. In social
science, in contrast, the terms in which we describe the things we wish to
explain are given for us in what Weber characterizes as the language of life.(7) There is no a priori
reason that this is true, but it nevertheless is true: there are no nomic regularities that
correspond to the facts that can be described in the language of life.
Nevertheless,
causal explanation is part and parcel to some extent of all of the human
sciences, or as Weber typically calls
them, the historical sciences, even where these sciences are constituted
and define themselves in such a way as to minimize the significance of
causality. Weber resolves this conflict
by arguing that there is a different relevant notion of causality, which he
identifies with a very specific legal theory of causal explanation developed by
his
This account defines “adequate causation” as an increase in
the probability of an event if we compares the probability of the event given
the cause in question together with a selected set of background causes and the
probability of the event given the background causes on their own.
Von Kries provides him with a plausible and easily
generalized notion of causality that does not depend on the existence of
genuine regularities and is entirely consistent with the formulation of both
input and output causes and outcomes in “the language of life.” It is a method that allows us to speak of
causes of the kind familiar to the historian, such as the causes of World War
I, but also allows us to speak of the causal contribution of such things as the
reasons that a given person had which contributed to an action, such as the
elements of a decision. The notion of
cause here is not an experimental notion but rather one based on expectations
derived from the ordinary course of events which are then applied to particular
actions in order to make sense of them both “causally” and “rationally.”
Weber’s solution in principle to the problem of reasons and
causes, then, is to require that an explanation of an action be “adequate” both
at the level of understanding or interpretation, which is to say that it makes
the action within its circumstances intelligible in terms of a type concept
that is already understood, and adequate at the level of cause, which is to
say, consistent with our expectations about the contribution of a particular
reason as a cause in a set against the background of a similar set of
circumstances or causal conditions.
Is
this an adequate conception of action in contemporary terms? It compares to the writings of Donald
Davidson on anomalous monism,(9)
though there are significant differences. Like Weber, Davidson argues that actions can
be understood causally in terms of reasons together with what he calls
pro-attitudes, which are motivational sources of varying strength. He says also
that “reasons exlanations...are in some sense low-grade; they explain less than
the best explanations in the hard sciences because of their relieance on
propensities.”(10)
Davidson also acknowledges that the genuinely nomic causes of human action
cannot be articulated within the language of life.(11) But unlike Weber, for
whom the typification of rationality with respect to action is one, though the
most useful and powerful, of a myriad of intelligibility producing
typifications, such as the typification of actions done out of emotions (in
which, for example, the evidence of an angry face, together with sufficient
motivating circumstances, justifies the application of the typification “done
out of anger”). For Weber, these various typifications are in effect on equal
footing as intelligibility producers and potential causes, though obviously
some will be more useful than others in particular contexts.
Weber does not deny that such things as biological causes
are causal contributors to human action even when they are not part of the
language of life or a typification of the kind that renders an action
intelligible. When he comments that the
facts described by the concept of charisma seem to fade off from the
intelligible into the unintelligible, where they can best be accounted for as
biologically caused phenomena, he acknowledges the limitations of the
understanding of actions as actions, that is to say as fully intelligible, and
he freely concedes that large areas of even intelligible action are co-produced
by reasons or causes construed in the language of life and biological
causes.
Davidson, in contrast, is committed to the indispensability
of the paradigm of rational choice or decision theory treating it as
inseparable from the notion of intelligibility and reasons with respect to
human actions. This is to say that Weber
accepts what we might call piecemeal intelligibility, intelligibility in terms
of a variety of distinct typifications, while Davidson believes that the
wholesale conception of rationality is necessary to the understanding of
action. It should noted that Davidson’s
account, unlike Weber’s, forces him into a series of questions about the status
of decision theory as, so to speak, an a priori psychology and leads him
to claim that it is both a priori to and “empirical.”
It also leaves Davidson, unlike Weber, with the problem of akrasia
or weakness of will, a problem that arises from the ubiquitous gaps between
the possession of reasons and actions. Akrasia is not a problem for
Weber, for two reasons. Because Weber considers typifications of actions to be
ideal-typical in character and therefore holds that the extent to which an
apparent action is in fact an action is a matter of degree and fact rather than
a matter that can be settled a priori. Moreover, akrasia is a
familiar and intelligible phenomenon, which, in Weber’s terms, we can typify.
But
in the end, the differences are limited. Davidson in his own way acknowledges
the co-production of action by biology and reasons.(12) He argues that his own
account of the logic of action explanation, in which reasons together with a
“pro-attitude” constitute the kind of “cause” appropriate to human action, is
connected to the brain, which processes information and desire in two different
places. Thus like Weber he grants that having a reason is not enough, and that
the kind of cause appropriate to human action is not the same as that in the
nomic sciences. But where Weber takes the view that in interpreting action,
reasons and pro-attitudes are packaged together in typifications which make
action intelligible, and that the probability of action outcomes is a separate
issue, Davidson takes the view that the two elements of action– reasons and
pro-attitudes- have distinct biological sources. Yet for both of them, these
biological sources are unusable as action explanations because they are
not in the language of life, and thus there is no possibility of reduction or
“explanation” in the nomic sense. And for Weber, the probabilities of outcomes
are potentially influenced by co-producers, such as the biological causes that
contribute to charisma.
Whether one prefers to accept Weber’s difficulties or
Davidson’s on this matter, it is relevant to note that the dispute over the
status of what Weber thinks of as the ideal type of total rationality was well
developed in Weber’s own lifetime, and a contrast between the two was discussed
by Alfred Schutz, who adhered to the position of von Mises, who identified
action by definition with rational action and thus, like Davidson, denied that
actions which could not be made intelligible in terms of rationality were,
properly speaking, actions at all. Unlike Davidson, for Weber intelligibility
in terms of typifications is not limited to what he treats as the
“typification” of rational action, and the characteristic of “being an action”
is a matter of degree.
One final similarity is in Davidson’s and Weber’s views of
the empirical status of the model of rational choice. Davidson was involved in the continued
discussion in the psychological field of decision science of the status of
decision theory as a model of human decision-making, a literature faced with
the problem that actual human decisions systematically vary from the
“normative” model, which nevertheless seems to be a priori valid.
Davidson presents the issue in this way:
«It
may seem that I want to insist that decision theory, like the simple postulate
that people tend to do what they believe will promote their ends, is
necessarily true, or perhaps analytic, or that it states part of what we mean
by saying someone prefers one alternative to another. But in fact I want to say
none of these things, if only because I understand none of them. My point is
skeptical, and relative. I am skeptical that we have a clear idea of what
would, or should, show that decision theory is false; and I think that compared
to attributions of desires, preferences or beliefs, the axioms of decision
theory lend little empirical force to explanations of action».(13)
Weber expressed this same sense that “rationality” was
neither a priori nor empirical with his notion that rationality was an
ideal-type. To put the problem in Weber’s terms, the question is whether the
ideal type “rationality” is merely a typification or is genuinely explanatory,
in spite of its lack of correspondence to actual human decision making. It is
notorious that Weber’s uses of the term rationality were various, shifting, and
irreducible to a single sense.
Davidson
makes a related point when he says “The issue is not whether we all agree
exactly on what the norms of rationality are; the point is rather that we all
have such norms, and that we cannot recognize as thought phenomena that are too
far out of the line. Better say: what is too far out of line is not thought”. (14) Weber would reach the same
conclusion by way of typification: action we cannot typify as action (including
rational action) is, for us, not action.
2. Models and Ideal-types
Weber’s use of the term ideal type and typification may
appear to place him in the epistemic dark ages. Not only is this language no
longer current, the neo-Kantian notions of concept and conceptualization from
which it derives, such as Rickert’s idea of the hiatus irrationalis
between concept and reality, is no longer current. Nevertheless, the issues that
Weber sought to address by the use of these terms are alive in contemporary
philosophy. In the case of rationality,
as we have seen, the issue is phrased in terms of normativity.
Decision
theory is a “normative” conception whose empirical significance and thus its
explanatory power is problematic. The
question is whether the normative
conception is in some sense indispensable or necessary for the constitution of
the subject matter, for example, for the intelligible interpretation of the
beliefs of other people, as Davidson suggests in “The very idea of a conceptual
scheme”.(15)
Weber in his discussion of ideal types faced the problem of normativity in
almost the same form, since he was compelled to distinguish the explanatory
from the “dogmatic” uses of the same concept, and to explain that the unique
ideal of rationality was abstract and therefore ideal in the sense of
ideational rather than “normatively preferable.” Weber gives, as an example,
the problem of explaining the blunders made by a general in the battlefield,
something that requires a model of correct decision making against which actual
conduct could be compared to identify the blunder to be explained.
This
approach was the one taken up by Popper
in The Poverty of Historicism under the label of “the logic of the
situation”: that the normative conception can serve as a baseline for asking
questions about the influences on action by allowing the analyst to see what
produced deviations from “rationality”.(16) This is an approach
totally consistent with psychological decision theory, which treats deviations
from the normative as “biases.” But for Weber (unlike Popper), there is a
rationale for treating the normative model (understood as an ideal-type), as a
baseline: it is, as he argues, the most intelligible ideal-type, for us. Thus
the justification for its use is purpose-relative rather than a priori,
and the purpose is central to the aims of historical science as an “understanding”
discipline.
In this form, the consideration of normativity is
irrelevant. Instead, the notion of ideal type compares closely to contemporary
philosophy of science discussions of models, which similarly are both
idealizations rather than law-like statements and useful both to make
simplifications of complex situations in order to make predictions and to use
these simplifications to identify sources of interference that may themselves
have important, even overwhelming predictive significance.
As a construction (of such things as the patrimonial state,
Cadi justice, or charismatic authority), an ideal-type implies nothing about
their correspondence to reality, their actual predictive power, or their
desirability as a state of affairs. The
term “ideal” here implied merely that the type could be fully articulated as an
idea and thus be able to be used to contrast to a complex and messy reality for
various explanatory purposes. Deviations
from the ideal might be as useful in defining explanatory issues as informative
to an ideal.
The present relevance of Weber views on ideal types or
models is, ironically, perhaps greater today than it has been for the rest of
the intervening century, where social scientists, under the influence of the model
of physical law and logical positivism, sought to construct “general theories”
of societies as systems, or obsessed about the differences between reasons and
causes. The notion of models or ideal
types in Weber’s hands cuts across these distinctions by, in the first place,
treating reasons of particular types, typifications, which are usually
mini-models, and by treating rationality itself as a model. This means that a model can be constructed of
some phenomena, such as the disappearance of a type of money in a two currency
system, the case covered by
This
is a model rather than a law. It
predicts what will happen if people reasoned about the value of currency in
particular ways and act on those reasons without interference by other reasons
or causes. Here the explanatory part of
the model is rationality, but rationality applied in a very specific setting,
reduced to a very small number of rational considerations. But other models may be constructed that do
not get organized around this element.
Weber’s model of the ancient city as discussed by M. I. Finley is such a
model.(17) It is essentially a model of an ancient
economy in terms of its inputs/outputs and the social and political structures
that enable the economy to function.
The uses of such a model are multiple. It predicts, enables interpretation, enables
comparisons that point to explanations of differences, and so forth, but it is
explicitly a simplification, or abstraction, and thus not “true” but rather
applicable to rich and complex situations where the richness is an unusable
distraction which needs to be reduced, but which cannot be usefully reduced to
scientific (or for that matter economic) “laws.”
It was formerly
thought that the sciences which were in a position to reduce the richness or
complexity of the subject matter by constructing artificial experiments had the
advantage over the social sciences, because experiments in a very simplified
set of circumstances could be constructed to match up with the issues in
crucial experiments between theories or for producing direct confirmation of
theories. But generalizing from
experiment is a problem that requires the richness of cases to be taken into
account, and the only means for doing this is the construction of an
intermediate abstraction, a model, for this purpose. These models may be made
up of theoretical principles but they also (and often) involve interactions
between variables whose properties are unpredicted by the theory but which can
be estimated from the data itself. This
puts social science and natural science on something closer to an equal
epistemic footing, and at the same time rescues Weber’s usage from the antique
language in which it is presented.
3. Cultural Categories
Perhaps
the most relevant of Weber’s core ideas, which we have already alluded to,
concerns the cultural constitution of the objects of social science.(18) Weber’s methodological
enemies divide into roughly two groups.
One group believes that the cultural constitution of the subject matter
is irrelevant as long as we can identify data points and treat these as facts
which can be related statistically or in some other quantitative way. Durkheim’s famous slogan, “treat social facts
as things,” is an expression of this impulse, but it appears in an even more
unmediated form in standard social science methodology where any quantifiable
material becomes, by virtue of its quantifiability, a potential subject of statistical
analysis and “theory.”
The
second group of Weber’s enemies are what I will dub apriorist. The paradigm case of apriorism in the philosophy of social science
is the distinction between reasons and causes itself, which grants a priori
status of irreducibility, correctness, and descriptive validity to those
descriptions of conduct or action which correspond to the reasons of the agent
or of the agent’s linguistic community, represented especially by Peter Winch.(19) There are however, many
other a priori starting points.
Von Mises’ equation of rationality and action is one of them-- all
actions are by definition rational and nothing that is not rational is properly
speaking an action. Here we see the a
priori structure in a particularly naked form.
But many other thinkers such as George Herbert Mead have
constructed the problem of explaining human activity in terms of considerations
that are also a priori. For Mead,
the problem of priority is one in which particular features of human activity,
such as symbol use, are taken for granted as valid descriptors and subjects to
be explained, and the problem becomes to account for the conditions for the
intelligible use of these concepts in analysis.
Thus Mead criticized the a priori notion of the self by showing
that others were a condition for the construction of the self. This style of analysis works fundamentally by
taking some particular fact in the human realm as given, as Mead does, and inquiring
into its conditions. Alfred Schutz,
similarly, took human understanding of the other as the thing to be accounted
for and inquired into the phenomenological conditions for such understanding.
Weber’s
response to all of this is to collapse the problem of the a priori into
the problem of the arbitrariness of categories of, as he puts it, selection
from the meaningless chaos of existential judgments that would face us if we
approached reality “without presuppositions.”(20) His argument is that the
social sciences have already had the selection made for them, in the first
instance, by the constitution of the subject matter in the language of
life. For him, the problem of
understanding is a matter of our interest.
We choose to be concerned with human things described in human language.
Terms like “action” or “the city” are, initially at least, simply terms of
common usage which constitute our subject matter for us. We then make further
conceptual refinements in our selections from reality based on our specific
explanatory interests.
For Weber, sociology itself is not, so to speak, a subject
matter grounded in the nature of the universe but is rather grounded in the
choices that we make to define the subject.
His definition of sociology, as the study of meaningful social action,
has no special status as a definition. It is not further grounded in an a
priori, philosophically groundable ontology or epistemology which selects
it as the only possible definition– something that many of his critics and
interpreters, such as Schutz found to be a failing. Like the conceptual categories that Weber
deploys, its only claim on us is the claim of utility, and utility is utility
in reference to culturally generated and fundamentally ordinary kinds of purposes
of understanding, such as the purpose of understanding the historical causes of
present day capitalism, rather than, so to speak, universal epistemic goals,
such as the final truth about the nature of society.
This is an important move because it temporalizes,
historicizes, and makes culturally relative all of the problematic
philosophical distinctions, even including the distinction between reasons and
causes, which have been the subject of
aprioristic philosophizing during the 20th century. The significance of doing this is that it
undermines any sort of absolutization of particular concepts. The notion of the
self, for example, becomes available to us as a theoretical or conceptual term
which we can use to define problems, but our use of it always comes with the
implicit qualification that the term may be historically rooted in the language
of life of a very specific historical community, ours, and that its
applicability elsewhere cannot be taken for granted, and indeed that the
applicability and historical origins and development of such concepts becomes
fair game for sociological analysis itself.
Thus the modern notion of the self is,
as Weber implicitly treats it, the product of a particular theodicy that
is part of the theology of reformation Protestantism, without which there would
not be the concept of “the self” in its present form.
Philosophers
have come very slowly to this appreciation of the pervasiveness of the problem
of the historicity of concepts, in spite of the early recognition, at least
within the Continental tradition, of the historical mutability even of such
basic concepts as Being. More recently, philosophers such as Charles Taylor
have developed philosophical analogues to the sociological stories that Weber
tells, both with respect to the self, and with respect to modernity
(21) in his book on
modernity. It is evident that the same
kinds of methodological issues, especially issues of differences in epistemic
purposes, bear on the claims of these books and on their claim to improve upon
and supplant Weber himself.
This strategy of
historicization, applied reflexively, raises a question for Weber that was
pointed out repeatedly by his critics in the twenties. Is Weber’s own conception of social science
transhistorical, and if so, how can the idea of a transhistorical conception of
social science be understood within the framework of the purpose-relative
conception of social science in which fundamental conceptual schemes and
categories are understood to be historical.
His admirers, notably Karl Jaspers, argued that his conception of social
science was itself purpose-relative, an instrument or a probe, which was itself
subject to revision and which made no claim to finality or absoluteness.
Understanding
the arguments in this way brings Weber very close to the Heideggerian notion of
every form of knowledge being a form of concealment, because Weber himself
suggested that the content of social science changed as “the light of the great
cultural concerns moves on”.(22) This is a perfectly reasonable reconstruction of
Weber which places it in the general framework of recent Continental
philosophy. Weber himself, I would suggest, would not have argued in quite this
way, and his strategy in relation to the causal character of historical
sciences provides a model that is useful for understanding how he might have
responded differently to these issues.
Weber
argued that all historical sciences are concerned, at least in some minimal
respect, with causal questions, and are thus compelled to deal with the issues
that arise out of the problems of applying the notion of causality in the human
realm, including the notion of the need for a selection of categories with
which to define the causal questions, a problem that cannot be answered in
terms of nature and cannot be separated from the language of life.(23) In relation to the
question of the grounding of his own methodological conception, I suspect that
the most “Weberian” response that could be constructed it would be along the
same lines: one which focused on the notion of intelligibility as the common
element of the human sciences.
The
Weberian approach to the problem of collective concepts provides a useful
illustration of this kind of reasoning. Weber famously proclaimed himself an
enemy of collective concepts, but did not do so on metaphysical grounds, either
on the grounds of an ontological individualism, or for that matter on the
grounds that Popper would later construct as methodological individualism. Instead he argued that collective concepts
were explanatorily dispensable for the particular purposes of sociology as
he defined them, i.e in terms of “the interpretive understanding of social
action and thereby with the causal explanation of its course and consequence”,
(24) and that from this point
of view they were fictions– useful and
even, for the practical purposes of such sciences as legal science, necessary,
but fictions for sociology. The thrust of his study on the categories of
interpretive sociology was to show how one could understand these concepts
without claiming they represent realities.
This is not, as
in Popper, the result of a methodological decision to see how far one can go in
explanation without appealing to collective concepts. But what does it
establish? And how? What it seems to
establish is the interest-relative character of such concepts- their dependence
on special disciplines, such as the presupposition of the notion of legality
for dogmatic legal science, or the presupposition of the notion of the state
for political science. purpose-relative justifications of the use of collective
concepts, rather than ontological or generic “methodological” justifications.
This is a conclusion that theorists in these fields have typically attempted to
avoid. Philosophers of law in the tradition of Kelsen and Hart, for example,
have insisted that certain features of the law, such as the notion of
obligation, is factual rather than fictional or “dogmatic” (and that they
cannot without circularity be understood as “merely legal”) and thus that the
subject matter of the law cannot be explained without “changing the subject” if
such notions as legal obligation are not recognized as genuine in a non-purpose
relative sense.
The
contemporary literature on collective intentionality is parallel in structure.(25) One line of argument, which
Weber did not address, is that an individualist ontology has no more claim than
on our intelligence than a collectivist one, and that any preference for
individual over collective ontologies is groundless. How could he have responded? Weber, like some
contemporary philosophers, such as Susan Hurley,(26) could have argued that the preference need not be ontological
and need not be groundless. Our understanding of individual action and the
beliefs of individuals as well as their intentions is for Weber and Hurley
clearly superior to our capacity to understand “collective intentions.” Thus if
a preference for greater degrees of intelligibility, which Weber could argue
(parallel to his argument that all of the historical sciences are in some
respect concerned with causal relations) is central to the shared purposes of
disciplines concerned with human action, is a common ground, then preferring
explanations in terms of the beliefs, intentions, and actions of individuals, to
the extent that it is sufficient for the explanatory purposes in question, is
justified by this more basic preference.
When Weber wrote, the situation of the social sciences was
such that it might reasonably have been supposed that the various approaches of
the social sciences could be integrated, but that one or another of these
approaches would prove overwhelmingly more fruitful than the others, and that
the methodology of the social sciences could be reduced to the methodology of
the most successful approach. It could reasonably have been supposed that some
version of the model of natural science could successfully be applied to the
social sciences raising the successful application to the status of science,
thus freeing it from the limitations which Weber stressed as characteristic of
the historical sciences.
Much of social science writing and methodology in the 20th
century reflected this idea of integration. But what transpired, despite the
aggressive attempts of writers such as Talcott Parsons to prevent it, was a
radical fragmentation of approaches, especially in sociology, but to some
extent the other social sciences as well, in which different forms of problem
constitution generated significant bodies of research scholarship, and
constituted their problems in such as way that they could not easily be
dismissed as non-scientific, irrelevant, and so forth. In short, methodological
and theoretical pluralism established itself in practice, rather than merely in
theory.
Nevertheless
these approaches were partially circular in just the way that Weber expected.
The problems of an empirical nature that arose within them were problems that
arose because they were constructed in particular conceptual terms, and there
could be no argument of a convincing kind for the exclusive relevance of those
particular terms. The social sciences
thus became, in the language of the sixties and seventies, following Kuhn,
multi-paradigm sciences in which diversity was irremediable and the dream of a
single unified science of society or social life receded even in the writings
of philosophers of social science themselves.
4. Normativity and Intelligibility
The
apparent, and partial, exception to this is economics, and the model of rational
choice. This model presents today, as it did in Weber’s time, a series of
puzzles about the fundamental character and logical status of decision theory.
And it is in the tangle of issues that arise in the characterization of
rationality, with “problems of rationality” as a recent volume of the collected
essays of Davidson is entitled,(27) that Weber’s present relevance becomes especially
apparent. The problems of rationality are inter-related, and, for Weber as with
Davidson, it is the connectors which link the parts of their thought that are
most puzzling and problematic. And it is in comparing the two in this respect
that one can see most clearly the coherence of Weber’s position, and its
distinctiveness.
Begin
with some common thoughts between Davidson and Weber: that there is an
unbridgeable divide between the language of intentional action, that is to say
the language of belief, and the language of scientific law. This means that
there can be no “serious science of psychology,” as Davidson puts it, meaning a
science that actually explains actions, or the rest of the “psychological”
domain, in anything like the language of intention and belief. Davidson puts
this point in terms of the propositional attitudes (believes that, knows that,
fears that, and the like), and says “that there is an irreducible difference
between psychological explanations that involve the propositional attitudes and
explanations in sciences like physics and physiology.(28) Weber puts this contrast
in terms of “subjective meaning,” which amounts to essentially the same point:
for something to have subjective meaning for someone is to have a propositional
attitude toward that thing. They agree as well that action explanation is
nevertheless, that is despite not being transformable into the sorts of things
that can be explained by laws, as discussed above.
What
is not in common is the way they characterize the difference. For Davidson,
“the concepts we use to explain and describe thought, speech, and action, are
irreducibly normative” (29) Weber of course held the same view, but under the
heading of “value-relatedness.” For Weber “values” already enter into the
descriptions one makes in the language of life.(30) Moreover, Weber thought of
ordinary language as the expression of a valuative world outlook, and thus
distinctive to the epoch. Thus they agree on the normativity of descriptions of
intentional action, but seem to disagree on the reasons for it. Davidson, in
“The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” dismisses the idea of distinct
conceptual schemes on which Weber appears to rely, and indeed he might have
listed Weber, along with Kuhn, as an example of the kind of thinker who, like
Kuhn, “is brilliant at saying what things were like before the revolution
using– what else– our post-revolutionary idiom.”(31) Against this Davidson
argues that we could not understand another culture if we do not assume that
many of the beliefs of the speakers in another culture are true and like our
own, without which we would have no basis for translating and interpreting
their beliefs, or even understanding them as beliefs and actions. This would
seem to rule out genuinely distinctive Weltanschauungen based on
different normativities or values, and indeed, Davidson, in a discussion of the
problem of the objectivity of values, embraces the objectivity of values.
But here the differences are not so great as they initially
appear. Weber uses the term Weltanschauung, but he also emphasizes that
it is an abstraction, an ideal-type construction of a more complex set of
individual beliefs and ideas. And although I have loosely used the term
“culture” here to characterize his views, he does nothing to ontologize any of
these collective mental concepts, or make them into fixed units, such as
paradigms. He does not suppose that the thoughts (including the typifications
and schemes of significance) of other people in other eras is always accessible
to us, but does take the view that to the extent that they are, they must be
accessible through our typifications, though of course these typifications may
be refined and abstracted to be made more useful for the purpose of making
sense of these other eras. For Weber we are condemned to the scheme of
significance of our present, but we can extend it through abstraction.
Where does this leave us with the normativity of
rationality, and normativity generally? With respect to the normativity of
decision theory, they appear have different views. Weber takes “rationality” to
be an ideal-type among others, but primus inter pares with respect to
its power to produce intelligibility.
Davidson seems to be close to Mises, in making rationality inseparable
from action. But there are some ambiguities in each of their formulations that
parallel one another and bring them closer together. There is an ambiguity in
common, between rationality as something more or less fixed and something more
or less local and “ours.” For Weber, “logic,” which might be taken for him to
include calculation and decision-theory, was non-valuative, in contrast to the
domain of described facts of the historical sciences, in which a “valuative”element
entered. What is valuative is, for Weber, what is ours: logic is everyone’s.
The dilemma is this. For Weber, to acknowledge that the typifications
we use in interpretation are not necessarily valid transhistorically is to
acknowledge an element of historical relativism. But to acknowledge that what
counts as explanation or science for us is also not necessarily valid
transhistorically seems to amount to making the methodological or second order
claims also historically relative. And this is indeed what the critics of the
fact value distinction, such as Strauss, did argue. Davidson’s parallel problem is this: if
psychology cannot be a “serious science” like physics, is it not merely a
restatement of (local) folk psychology with no autonomous claim to empirical
validity?
Davidson
has a famous answer in general to such concerns which applies to folk
psychology: we simply cannot understand the claim that our beliefs might be
massively wrong. We can make sense of the claim that one or another of our
beliefs is wrong. But we cannot as an interpreter “correctly interpret another
speaker [such as one from another culture] in such a way that the speaker’s
beliefs come out massively false inthe interpreters opinion”.(32) Folk psychology forms such a large part of
our beliefs that it cannot be as a whole massively false. If we meet up with a
people whose language appears to lack terms corresponding to our fears that,
wants that, and so forth and we could not translate what they do say to mean
something that produces more or less similar results, we would simply be unable
to translate them at all.
The sceptic who questions whether we might after all be
massively wrong is claiming that there could indeed be such a culture. Davidson’s point here is similar to his point
about rationality. We simply cannot make sense of the claim that the ordinary
notion of rationality is false. As with the interpreter of another culture, we
cannot even attribute intelligible error to another speaker without relying on
it, without assuming that the other speaker is largely in conformity with it.
Weber does not
make this claim. As an interpreter, he treated “rationality” as an ideal-type,
as something that belongs to us, as part of our language of life and historical
period, and for which there are no guarantees that it is transhistorically
applicable or applicable to other cultures. But this is not as different a
claim than Davidson’s as it might appear, despite the fact that Davidson cuts
the basic distinctions in a different way. For Weber, the difference is between
non-normative logic and values. For Davidson, logic and rationality are
“normative” concepts.
But even this distinction turns out to be less significant
than it first appears. For Davidson, as a Quinean, even something that we can
have no clear idea of what it would be show them to be false, such as the
principles of logic or decision-theory, cannot be a priori truths fo us
as theorists about the world. In theory at least, something can come along that
could compel us to abandon them. But for interpretation, including the
interpretation of other cultures, we need less than this notion of rationality:
a set of sentences that we can determine to be true, and some inferential connections
between them, will enable us to construct a translation manual that allows us
to show that the members of the other culture for the most part reason as we do
and inhabit the same world.
Davidson,
however, sees the problem of values in terms of degrees of dispensability
rather than categorical differences. He acknowledges that there are genuine
moral conflicts,(33)
which of course are the centerpiece of Weber’s “relativistic” discussion of
values, and these seem to include Weber’s own cases. But he also notes that
evaluative attitudes have as their objects propositions that have truth value,(34) and argues that the
issues of intelligibility that constrain our interpretations of other cultures
arise here as well, so that “the more basic a norm is to our making sense of an
agent, the less content we can give to the idea that we disagree with respect
to that norm.” (35)
This means that the norms of basic logic don’t lend themselves to
“disagreement” claims, while the cases of value choice cited by Weber do.
For Davidson, the problem of understanding other cultures
is one of understanding their sentences. To understand is to construct a
translation manual, something that is not possible unless many of the sentences
that are true for them are true for us. But this is a conception that does not
require a “theory of meaning” and indeed, as we shall see, precludes an
ordinary theory of meaning. Our access to the meaning of their sentences
through translation is through determining what sentences they take to be true.
But true for Davidson here is true in a Tarskian sense. Thus understanding,
more generally, is a matter of triangulation, in which we check utterances
against both the conditions we take to be the truth conditions of the sentence
and also against the truth conditions that others take to be their truth
conditions. This is meaning in a surface sense, and there is no more meaning to
be had.
For Weber, the corresponding
steps are made in terms of typifications. There is no direct comparison between
some sort of independent “reality” and our “typifications,” because the objects
we are inquired into are already partly conceptualized or typified. But for
Weber, the elements of triangulation are implicit in the task, which he
stressed, of making sense to a particular historically located audience of
intelligibility seeking hearers. Similarly, when in ordinary life we typify the
behavior of others , there is a human check on our typifications in the actions
that follow from the typification. If we mis-typify in ordinary life, we are
likely to discover that our expectations are wrong, and our actions in the rest
of the web of typifications based on these wrong expectations will lead to
difficulties with others. But for Weber as for Davidson there is no getting
beyond useful typifications to essences, or to a “reality” that can serve as a
standard. For both of them, the indispensable starting point is with us, and
the standards of adequacy of interpretation are necessarily ours. We can refine
them, but there is no God’s eye view which our refinements will reach.
(1) J.
S. Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected
View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation,
Collected works of John Stuart Mill ; v. 7-8 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1973-4).
(2) H. H. Bruun, Science,
Values, and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology,
(3) Leo
Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1953).
(4) Alfred Schutz, The
Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick
Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1932]1967).
(5) Michael Friedman, Reconsidering
Logical Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and
Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
(
(6) Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological
Problems of Economics, trans. George Reisman (Princeton, NJ: D. Van
Nostrand Company, Inc., 1960).
(7) Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre
(Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr, 1988), p. 209.
(8) The connection
has been discussed elsewhere, particularly in Stephen Turner, The Search for a
Methodology of Social Science in Durkheim, Weber, and the Nineteenth Century
Problem of Cause, Probability, and Action, Boston Studies in the Philosophy
of Science, 92. (
(9) Donald
Davidson, Mental Events (1970) in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford:
Claredon Press, 1980), pp. 207-228.
(10) Donald Davidson, Problems
in the Explanation of Action (1987) in his Problems of Rationality (
(11) Davidson, Mental Events, p
225.
(12) Cf.
his discussion of emotion and analysis, the two elements of his “causes” of
human action, as arising from different parts of the brain, in Donald Davidson,
Objectivity and Practical Reason (2000) in his Problems of Rationality
(Oxford: Claredon Press, 2004), pp. 52-57.
(13) Donald Davidson, Hempel on
Explaining Action (1976) in his Essays on Actions and Events, p. 273.
(14) Donald Davidson, quoted in
Pascal Engel, The Norms of the Mental, in Lewis Hahnd, ed. The Philosophy of
Donald Davidson (
(15) Donald
Davidson, “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) in his Inquiries
into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1974]1984), pp.
183-98.
(16) Karl Popper, The Poverty
of Historicism 3rd edn. (New York: Harper and Row [1957]1961).
(17) M.
I. Finley, Ancient History: Evidence and Models (New York: Viking Press,
1986).
(18) The
term cultural is not Weber’s and is used here as a simplification. As Weber
himself says “those ‘ideas’ that govern the behavior of the population of a
given epoch, i.e., which are concretely influential in determining their
conduct, can, if a somewhat complicated construct is involved, be formulated
precisely only in the form of an ideal-type, since empirically it exists in
the minds of an indefinite and constantly changing mass of individuals and
assumes in their minds the most multifarious nuances of form, and content,
clarity and meaning,” Max Weber, The
Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward Shils and Henry A. Finch
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), pp. 95-96.
(19) Peter
Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (New
York: Humanities Press, 1958).
(20) Max Weber, The
Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 78.
(21) Charles
Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Charles Taylor, Modern Social
Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).
(22) Max Weber, The
Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 112.
(23) Davidson, as it happens,
makes a very similar point about “the dependence of the concept of cause on our
interests” He observes that “Science, it is true, strives to overcome the
interest relativity of ordinary causality.” But goes on to say that “science
may without prejudice or circularity note the facts about human nature that
reflect interests: the facts about salience, attention,, and tendencies to
generalize in some ways rather than others,” ie. the common features of our
interest in causality”. In “Meaning, Truth and Evidence” (1990) in Truth,
Language, and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 61.
(24) Weber, Max, Economy and
Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 3 vols., Guenther Roth and
Claus Wittich eds. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press[1968]1978), p. 4.
(25) Raimo
Tuomela, The Philosophy of Social
Practices : A Collective Acceptance View (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002) ; John Searle, The
Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995);
Margaret Gilbert, “Walking Together: A
Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI
(Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1996), pp. 1-14; cf. Stephen Turner, What Do We Mean by We?,
“Proto Sociology” 18-19 (2003): 139-62.
(26) Susan Hurley, Natural
Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 157-8.
(27) Donald Davidson, Problems
of Rationality (Oxford: Claredon Press, 2004).
(28) Donald
Davidson, Problems in the Explanation of Action (1987) in his Problems of
Rationality, p.101.
(29) Donald Davidson, Reply to
Pascal Engel, Lewis Hahn, ed. The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, p. 460.
(30) A good guess as to what
Weber thought about the relation of value and description is to be gained by
comparing his to his personal philosophical interlocutor Emil Lask, who
struggled with the notion of concept formation, and argued that objects were
already partly conceptually constituted for us by the time we could treat them
as objects of thought.
(31) Donald Davidson, The Very
Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (1974) in his Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation, p. 184.
(32) The
quotation is from an explication by Ernest Sosa, Knowledge of Self, Others,
World, in Kirk Ludwig, ed. Donald Davidson (Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 168.
(33) Donald Davidson, The
Objectivity of Values (1995) in his Problems of Rationality, p. 41.
(34) Ibid., p. 55.
(35) Ibid., p. 50.