Max Weber, Objectivity in Social Science
Culture is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process ... But there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes.
Michael curates today’s Social Science Files exhibit:
In his essay on Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, first published in 1904, Max Weber wrote:
… ‘Culture’ is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance. This is true even for the human being who views a particular culture as a mortal enemy and who seeks to return to nature. He can attain this point of view only after viewing the culture in which he lives from the standpoint of his values, and finding it too soft. This is the purely logical-formal fact which is involved when we speak of the logically necessary rootedness of all historical entities in evaluative ideas. …
[Conclusion]
… We are now at the end of this discussion, the only purpose of which was to trace the course of the hair-line which separates science from faith and to make explicit the meaning of the quest for social and economic knowledge.
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. The means available to our science offer nothing to those persons to whom this truth is of no value.
It should be remembered that the belief in the value of scientific truth is the product of certain cultures and is not a product of man's original nature.
Those for whom scientific truth is of no value will seek in vain for some other truth to take the place of science in just those respects in which it is unique, namely, in the provision of concepts and judgments which are neither empirical reality nor reproductions of it but which facilitate its analytical ordering in a valid manner.
In the empirical social sciences, as we have seen, the possibility of meaningful knowledge of what is essential for us in the infinite richness of events is bound up with the unremitting application of viewpoints of a specifically particularised character, which, in the last analysis, are oriented on the basis of evaluative ideas.
These evaluative ideas are for their part empirically discoverable and analysable as elements of meaningful human conduct, but their validity can not be deduced from empirical data as such.
The “objectivity” of the social sciences depends rather on the fact that the empirical data are always related to those evaluative ideas which alone make them worth knowing and the significance of the empirical data is derived from these evaluative ideas.
But these data can never become the foundation for the empirically impossible proof of the validity of the evaluative ideas. The belief which we all have in some form or other, in the meta-empirical validity of ultimate and final values, in which the meaning of our existence is rooted, is not incompatible with the incessant changefulness of the concrete viewpoints, from which empirical reality gets its significance.
Both these views are, on the contrary, in harmony with each other. 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.
Now all this should not be misunderstood to mean that the proper task of the social sciences should be the continual chase for new viewpoints and new analytical constructs. On the contrary, nothing should be more sharply emphasized than the proposition that the knowledge of the cultural significance of concrete historical events and patterns is exclusively and solely the final end which, among other means, concept-construction and the criticism of constructs also seek to serve.
… Genuine artistry [in social science] … manifests itself through its ability to produce new knowledge by interpreting already known facts according to known viewpoints.
All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialisation, 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. Indeed, it will lose its awareness of its ultimate rootedness in the value-ideas in general.
And it is well that should be so.
But there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes.
The significance of the unreflectively utilised viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great cultural problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its analytical apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought. It follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labours:
Faust: Act 1, Scene 2
The newborn impulse fires my mind,
I hasten on, his beams eternal drinking,
The Day before me and the Night behind,
… the floor of waves beneath me …
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
The Source has been:
Max Weber, ‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy’, in Methodology of Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, The Free Press 1949
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