and sociology. It has its roots in the eighteenth-century German idealist philosophers including notably Immanuel Kant and especially Georg Hegel with the latter’s exclusive emphasis on ideas in culture. The idealist philosophies are of purely antiquarian interest to most philosophers of science today. Romantics have historically defaulted to the positivist philosophy for the natural sciences, but they reject imitating the positivist philosophy for the social sciences.
Aim of science:
For romantics the aim of the social sciences understood as investigations of culture is “interpretative understanding” of “human action”, by which is meant explanation of social interactions in terms of subjective mental states – ideas and motives, views and values – that are culturally shared by members of social groups.
This concept of the aim of science and of explanation is called a “foundational agenda”, because it requires reduction of the social sciences to a social-psychology foundation, i.e., description of observed social behavior by reference to subjective social-psychological mental states.
Discovery:
The discovery of theory in social science may be either the social scientist’s introspective reflection on his own ideas and motivations originating in his actual or imaginary experiences or originating in empirical survey research findings reporting respondents’ expressed ideas and motivations.
Romantics define “social theory” as language describing subjective mental states, notably culturally shared ideas and motivations.
Some romantics call the vicarious imputations based in introspective reflection “substantive reasoning” or “interpretative understanding”. But all romantic social scientists deny that social theory can be developed by data analysis exclusively or by observation of overt behavior alone.
Romantics therefore oppose their view of the aim of science to that of the positivists’ such as the sociologist George Lundberg and the behavioristic psychologist B.F. Skinner. Romantics say they explain consciously purposeful and motivated “human action”, while the behaviorists say they explain publicly observable “human behavior”. Some romantics call the study of human action “hermeneutics”.
Criticism:
The romantic criterion for criticism is “convincing” “interpretative understanding” that “makes substantive sense” of conscious motivations, which are deemed to be the underlying “causal mechanisms” of observed human action.
Causality is an ontological concept, and all romantics impose their mentalistic ontology as a prior criterion for criticism, while making empirical or statistical analyses at most optional and supplementary.
Furthermore many romantic social scientists demand the criterion that a social theory must be identifiable in the particular investigator’s own introspectively recognized subjective personal experience. In Max Weber’s terms this is called verstehen. It is the thesis that empathetic insight is a special and valuable tool in the study of human behavior, which is without counterpart in the physical sciences. It effectively makes all sociology what has been called “pop sociology” or “folk sociology”.
Explanation:
Romantics maintain that only “theory” that describes subjective motives can “explain” conscious human action.
Motives are the “mechanisms” identified in “causal” explanations, which are also therefore called “theoretical” explanations. Observed regularities are deemed incapable of “explaining”, even if they enable correct predictions.
Some formerly romantic social scientists such as the Institutionalist economist Wesley Mitchell and the functionalist sociologist Robert Merton have chosen to focus on objective outcomes rather than subjective motives.
2.02 Positivism
Historically positivism was a reaction against romanticism, but more recently it is has been relegated to history of philosophy. Positivism’s origins are in the eighteenth-century British empiricist philosophers including notably David Hume. But not until the late nineteenth century did positivism get its name from the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who also founded sociology.
The “neopositivists” were the last incarnation of positivism. They attempted to use the symbolic logic fabricated by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead early in the twentieth century, because they had fantasized that the Russellian truth-functional symbolic logic could serve philosophy, as mathematics has served physics. They are therefore also called “logical positivists”.
Contrary to romantics, positivists believe that all sciences including the social sciences share the same philosophy of science. They therefore reject the romantics’ dichotomy of sciences of nature and sciences of culture. And the positivists’ ideas about science originated in their reflection upon Newtonian physics.
Aim of science:
For positivists the aim of science is to produce explanations having objectivity grounded in language describing observations.
Their concept of the aim of science is thus also called a “foundational agenda”, although the required foundation is quite different from that of the romantics. Their foundation is observation.
Discovery:
Positivists believed that empirical laws are inferentially discovered by inductive generalization based on repeated observations.
They define empirical laws as universally quantified statements containing only “observation terms” describing observable entities and/or phenomena.
Early positivists such as Ernst Mach recognized only empirical laws for valid scientific explanations. But after Einstein’s achievements neopositivists such as Rudolf Carnap recognized hypothetical theories for valid scientific explanations, if the theories could be linguistically related to language used to report the relevant observations.
Positivists believed that theories are discovered by creative imagination, but they left unexplained the creative process of developing theories.
The neopositivists define theories as universally quantified statements containing any “theoretical terms”, i.e., terms that do not describe observable entities or phenomena.
Criticism:
The positivists’ criterion for criticism is publicly accessible observation expressed in language containing only “observation terms”.
They believed that empirical laws indirectly and tentatively warrant theories, when the laws can be logically derived from the theories.
Like Hume they deny that either laws or theories can be permanently validated empirically, but they require that the general laws be founded in observation as a condition for the objectivity needed for valid science. They maintain that particularly quantified observation statements describing singular events are incorrigible and beyond revision.
Unlike empirical laws, theories are not produced by induction from singular observations.
