Abstract
The relation between Durkheim’s Suicide and his Rules of Sociological Method is this: Suicide is, at least in part, an attempt to exemplify the doctrine expounded in the Rules. The relation between Weber’s methodological works and his writings on capitalism, both of which develop and change, is less straightforward. Weber referred to ‘Objectivity’ in ‘The Protestant Ethic’ (1958, p. 200), but he did not make explicit appeals to von Kriesian language or considerations in the body of the essay ‘The Protestant Ethic’. The primary evidence in Weber’s own writ for connections between the thesis of the protestant ethic essay and the methodological essays comes from the contemporary methodological essays themselves. In ‘Objectivity’, when he discussed the methodological problems of explaining capitalism, he seems to have been telling us how he regarded the explanation in ‘The Protestant Ethic’ (1949, pp. 89–98; 1922, pp. 189–99; 1958, p. 200).1
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Notes
Marshall, in In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism (1982, p. 33), suggests that the `Protestant ethic’ was itself an intervention into the Methodenstreit.
A better way into this tangle might be through the analysis of Weber’s concept of concrete historical individual proposed by Wagner and Zipprian (1985). They suggest that the concept derives from Mill’s view of proper names and can be construed in terms of Kripke’s semantics: if we treat Weber’s `concrete historical individual’ as the subject of a proper name, some of these highly diverse contrasts become intelligible — a proper name is not reducible to nomic particulars, nor can it be fully captured in universals, mental constructs, and so forth.
This passage might be glossed `where we are interested in causal relations between phenomena with proper names, we are not interested in nomic explanations, because these are explanations under a different, general, description’.
Translated by Gerth and Mills under its original subtitle `Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’ (1946, pp. 323–59).
Methodological individualism’ is not the only grounds one might have for a preference for accounts that disaggregate patterns into choices by individuals in various circumstances. One may, for example, simply say that this kind of account is de facto the most intelligible.
This approach to statistical relations is perhaps also a plausible construal of the role of `economic’ rational reconstructions when they are used to account for relations between aggregate patterns by disaggregating them into the actions of individuals acting for various reasons in various circumstances. Similar analyses may be given of other social science examples (Turner, 1977).
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© 1986 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Turner, S.P. (1986). Large-Scale Explanations: Aggregation and Interpretation. In: The Search for a Methodology of Social Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3461-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3461-5_11
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