Lecture 9 - “Objectivity” in Social Science PDF

“Objectivity” in Social Science MAX WEBER Introduction In comparison with Marx and Durkheim, Weber approach was more focused on agency, and more cultural in orientation. Weber proposed that the object of sociological analysis should be the action of individuals, inasmuch as it is oriented toward o...

“Objectivity” in Social Science MAX WEBER Introduction In comparison with Marx and Durkheim, Weber approach was more focused on agency, and more cultural in orientation. Weber proposed that the object of sociological analysis should be the action of individuals, inasmuch as it is oriented toward others. For him, ideas and value orientations –economic, political, religious, aesthetic, etc. – are central to sociological analysis because they motivate social action. Weber and Durkheim were part of the same generation of European scholars who worked to establish sociology as a scientific discipline. Nonetheless, Weber never mentioned Durkheim by name and in his work, made only a few general remarks about the “organic school”. Biography Maximilian Karl Emil Weber, better known as Max Weber, was born in 1864 in the suburbs of Berlin to well- off parents. Hi father, Max Weber Sr. was a career politician who enjoyed life while his wife, Helene Fallenstein, was a devout Calvinist who led an ascetic lifestyle. While both his parents were intellectuals that welcomed in their home important German figures from politics and academia, their marriage was full of tensions, given the different temperaments of Max and Helena. This impacted young Weber’s future work and personality. Given his privileged background and intelligence, Weber had no issue entering Heidelberg University as a law student, he later transfer to Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and then to the University of Göttingen. Biography While at first, he enjoyed the social life of a German bourgeois university student by drinking and fencing, he eventually become a more ascetic student after being confronted by his mother. He began to take Helena's side in family arguments and grew increasingly more estranged from his father. In 1889, he earned his law doctorate by writing a dissertation on legal history. Two years later, he completed his habilitation, a post-doctoral thesis titled Roman Agrarian History and Its Significance for Public and Private Law. After his habilitation, Weber quickly became an influential scholar in the fields of economic and legal history. However, in 1897 his father died two months after having a severe quarrel with him that was never resolved. This sent Weber into a crippling depression. Forced to leave his position as a professor, he spent the next several years trying to recover, even spending time in a sanatorium. While he was never able to fully recover, he nonetheless produced his most important works after his breakdown. Ideal-Type “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality.” – “Objectivity” in Social Science Ideal-Type “Inasmuch as the “points of view” from which they can become significant for us are very diverse, the most varied criteria can be applied to the selection of the traits which are to enter into the construction of an ideal-typical view of a particular culture.” Ideal Types “Whoever accepts the proposition that the “Individualism” knowledge of historical reality can or should be a “presuppositionless” copy of “objective” “Imperialism” facts, will deny the value of the ideal-type. […] “Feudalism” the historian, as soon as he attempts to go beyond the bare establishment of concrete “Mercantilism” relationships and to determine the cultural “Conventional” 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.” Ideal Types “The greater the need however for a sharp appreciation of the significance of a cultural phenomenon, the more imperative is the need to operate with unambiguous concepts which are not only particularly but also systematically defined.” What is essential to a cultural phenomenon? Social Science and Ideal Types “But social science in our sense is concerned with practical significance. This significance however can very often be brought unambiguously to mind only by relating the empirical data to an ideal limiting case. If the historian rejects an attempt to construct such ideal types as a “theoretical construction,” i.e., as useless or dispensable for his concrete heuristic purposes, the inevitable consequence is either that he consciously or unconsciously uses other similar concepts without formulating them verbally and elaborating them logically or that he remains stuck in the realm of the vaguely “felt.”” Empirical Knowledge and Ideal Types “The objective validity of all empirical knowledge rests exclusively upon the ordering of the given reality according to categories which are subjective in a specific sense, namely, in that they present the presuppositions of our knowledge and are based on the presupposition of the value of those truths which empirical knowledge alone is able to give us.” Life and Ideal Types “Life with its irrational reality and its store of possible meanings is inexhaustible. The concrete form in which value-relevance occurs remains perpetually in flux, ever subject to change in the dimly seen future of human culture. The light which emanates from those highest evaluative ideas always falls on an ever changing finite segment of the vast chaotic stream of events, which flows away through time.” Specialization in the Social Sciences “All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself. It will discontinue assessing the value of the individual facts in terms of their relationships to ultimate value-ideas.” Specialization in the Social Sciences “In contrast with this, the elementary duty of scientific self-control and the only way to avoid serious and foolish blunders requires a sharp, precise distinction between the logically comparative analysis of reality by ideal types in the logical sense and the value-judgment of reality on the basis of ideals. An “ideal type” in our sense, to repeat once more, has no connection at all with value-judgments, and it has nothing to do with any type of perfection other than a purely logical one.” Example of Weberian Ideal-Type: Types of Social Action 1) Instrumentally rational: “determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings; these expectations are used as “conditions” or “means” for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends”. 2) Value-rational: “determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success”. 3) Affectual (especially emotional): “determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states”. 4) Traditional: “determined by ingrained habituation”.