Social sciences differ from the natural sciences in one fundamental respect: while nature is meaningless, human action is meaningful. Physicists can explain why an apple fell from a tree by noting that the cause was a certain gravitational force. In contrast, when a historian tries to explain the actions of Napoléon Bonaparte on November 9, 1799, he has to impute that by seizing the control of the legislative councils in France, amongst other things, Napoléon meant to stage a coup d’état. To impute what an individual means to do is to characterise his actions, i.e. to discern the intentions on the part of the agent. This is the only way a social scientist can tell a story of what exactly happened.

In his essay, ‘The Concept of “Following a Rule”’, Max Weber brings out the importance of ‘meaning’ for social science. He asks the reader to ‘imagine two men who in other respects stand outside any “social relationship” – say, two savages of different tribes, or a European coming across a savage in darkest Africa’ (Weber 1978: 106). These two men ‘exchange’ two objects, as evidenced by certain physical movements. But, Weber (1978: 106) stresses, to follow just the physical events would not be to grasp the ‘essence’ of what happened,

for this ‘essence’ consists in the ‘meaning’ which the two men attach to this external behaviour and this ‘meaning’ attached to their present behaviour in turn represents the ‘following of a rule’ in their future behaviour. Without this ‘meaning’, so it is said, an ‘exchange’ would be neither possible in reality nor conceivable as a concept.

The characterisation of social action is necessary for the social scientist to make sense of the physical events he observes. Weber maintains that this procedure of assigning ‘meaning’ to individuals is objective. At this juncture, Weber is cautious to stress what he means by ‘objectivity.’ He does not mean that there is a single ‘correct’ meaning, something which the person ought to have meant by their actions. The objectivity of the characterisation of social action does not consist in assigning ‘meaning’ that is ‘“true” in some metaphysical sense’ (quoted in Dallmayr and McCarthy 1977: 38) nor in ‘what dogmatically ought to be’ (Weber 1978: 110). Rather, social science is ‘objective’ in the sense that the meaning assigned should not be arbitrary. It must be true for all ‘those who seek the truth’ (Weber 1949: 58).

The concept of ‘following a rule’ is problematic for objectivity in social science because the assignment of meaning is inherently evaluative. First, there is a methodological problem: the scientist is the external observer who can assign a different meaning to that which an individual attaches to his particular action. Secondly, there is an epistemological problem, i.e. the question of whether there can be any ‘real’ meaning or belief an agent should hold. The scientist who observes the working class individual from outside has to judge what ‘belief’ or ‘meaning’ is real and when, in contrast, it is only acted or insignificant to the analysis.

At the heart of the difficulty is this: what is real, accurate, or ‘adequate’ for the external observer is determined by the social theory the scientist happens to hold. When Steven Lukes, for example, defines ‘power’ as the ability of X to shape the interests and desires of Y, we have to explain what the latter’s interests were before the exercise of power by the former. But such an explanation entails a reference to what the ‘real’ interests of Y are, which, in turn, is inherently bound up with a specific theory about human wants. Here, value-judgements necessarily intrude into research. According to Alan Ryan (1976: 238), the fundamental difficulty for objectivity in social science is the fact that the observer can see what is going on as the agent sees it ‘only if the observer holds the same social theory as the agent does.’

In his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, the political sociologist Barrington Moore gives an example which highlights the subjectivity involved in the characterisation of social action. Moore argues that conservative historiographers, such as Greer, misrepresent the Terror that followed the French Revolution in saying that the violent events were part of an intra-class, not an inter-class, war. According to Moore (1967: 517), this constitutes an ‘overt denial of the significance of class conflict’ in that period of French history. Greer, amongst others, just looked at the statistics on the death-toll of the Grande Terreur. The numbers apparently serve as evidence for his thesis because 79 percent of the Terror’s victims were working class people and peasants. But, as Moore argues, the statistical evidence does not tell the whole story. The social scientist has to determine what the individual men and women meant by engaging in certain actions and whether this ‘counts’ as being an uprising against another class. Or, as Moore (1967: 518) puts it: ‘It is not only who fights but what the fight is about that matters.’

It follows that social science cannot be as objective as natural science, if it can be objective at all, precisely because the characterisation of social action involves value-judgements concerning what constitutes the ‘meaning’ of an action.

Ilaf Scheikh Elard is a second year P.E.P. undergraduate at the University of York.

References

Dallmayr, F.R. and T.A. McCarthy 1977: Understanding and Social Inquiry. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Moore, B. 1967: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Ryan, A. 1976: The Philosophy of the Social Sciences. London: Macmillan.

Weber, M. 1949: The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by E.A. Shils and H.A. Finch. New York: Free Press.

Weber, M. 1978: Max Weber: Selections in Translation. Translated by E. Matthews, edited by W.G. Runciman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.