Max Weber

Max Weber (1864-1920) is one of the few major figures of sociology whose ideas permeate the work of both quantitative and. qualitative sociologists... A major thrust of Weber’s methodology was to link the scientific concepts of general laws and causal analysis with the purportedly unique subject matter of social science — human beings.

Weber’s conception of sociology combines a concern for the individual (in particular, for his motives and meanings) with the goal of causal scientific explanation. His position was basically this: Any difference between the social and natural sciences comes from the basic fact that a social scientist is an object of the same type he is studying — a human. The fact that humans are interpretive animals — that they create meanings and work with symbolic and abstract representations — is what makes it possible for them to develop a science of any sort. But in the social sciences we have an additional advantage. In the case of inanimate objects and lower forms of life, we can only observe and describe them and, by interpretive understanding, detect patterns and general laws which they seem to obey. However, with humans we have an advance clue — we know about subjectivity. We have more or less directly experienced and observed our own motives, reactions, emotions, and meanings as they are connected to our social actions. Our fellows have communicated similar experiences to us in ordinary language. All this occurred before any science of human action began. Thus, the generic possibility that subjective elements determine actions is known to us.

Assuming that rocks or plants actually bad motives for their «behavior», it would be unclear that we could ever discover them. For, in order to find some things, one has to suspect in advance that they are there. Given that, as humans, we are aware of the general possibility of specific subjective states of others, there remains the question of how to go about gaining access to these states. Weber singled out three types of subjectivity, or «meanings», which were of special interest to the social scientist:

1. The concrete purposes, motives, and meanings of another person which accompany his specific social actions.

2. The average, common, or approximate meaning of something given to it by a group of people (the meaning of award in a language is of this type).

3. The meaning(s) attributed to a hypothetical ideal actor in a symbolic model of action which is constructed by the social scientist.

In Weber’s definition of sociology… the German word Verstehen has been translated as «understanding». Many American sociologists have associated the term Verstehen with Weber and have taken it to stand for a form of sociological analysis that emphasizes the achievement of empathetic appreciation as a goal. However, for Weber this was a secondary goal, the primary one being the acquisition of a causal explanation of social action. Empathetic understanding of the subjective elements of action was but one means, and not always a necessary one at that.

Thus we see Weber’s major use of Verstehen: the observation and interpretation of the subjective states of mind of other people. Verstehen generates hypotheses concerning the connections between subjective states and human action but does not validate them. These hypotheses and/or concepts were then put in theoretical models of social action, used to predict and understand courses of action.