Felix Kaufmann, Methodology of the Social Sciences (1944)

This file is a single-author methodological monograph. Kaufmann’s central concern is the logical status of the social sciences: how their claims can be tested, clarified, and made objective without appealing either to metaphysical foundations or to merely intuitive “understanding.” The work’s guiding thesis is anti-foundational but not skeptical. Empirical knowledge is possible, yet its validity rests on explicit procedures of inquiry rather than on self-evident starting points.

All attempts to base empirical science on ultimate grounds conceived as self-evident truths are foredoomed to failure.

This sentence frames Kaufmann’s critique of philosophies that seek certainty before science begins. For him, methodology does not supply indubitable premises; it analyzes how propositions are admitted, rejected, connected, and corrected within rule-governed inquiry. The point is especially important for the social sciences, where appeals to intuition, value, meaning, or historical insight often disguise unexamined standards of validation.

From the point of view of the logician, the procedure of an empirical science consists in the acceptance or elimination of propositions in accordance with given rules.

Kaufmann therefore shifts the problem of objectivity from psychological conviction to public procedure. A claim is not “objective” in isolation; it is objective only relative to rules that determine what counts as evidence, contradiction, clarification, or successful application. This move lets him preserve rigor without reducing social inquiry to a crude imitation of physics. The social sciences may use distinctive concepts, but their scientific character depends on disciplined operations of definition, inference, and empirical control.

It is therefore elliptical to speak simply of the objective validity of a proposition without indicating the rules of procedure in terms of which it is valid.

The structure of the work, as represented in the supplied passages, moves from this general logic of scientific validation toward applications in the analysis of social-scientific concepts, especially in economics and value theory. Kaufmann’s examples are not incidental illustrations; they show how methodological confusion arises when formal relations, empirical assertions, and meanings of terms are allowed to slide into one another. His use of economic symbolism marks an effort to make the assumptions of theory explicit rather than to replace social reality with mathematics.

Now let $p$ be the price per bottle, $\varphi(p)$ the demand corresponding to this price, and $\psi(p)$ the total costs of an output exactly covering this demand.

Such passages show Kaufmann’s characteristic method: formulate the theoretical relation as precisely as possible, then ask what kind of proposition it is. Is it a definition, a formal implication, an empirical hypothesis, or an interpretive convention? Much of the book’s relevance lies in this sorting operation. Social-scientific disputes often appear substantive when they are partly semantic; conversely, claims presented as conceptual necessities may smuggle in factual assumptions.

The later discussion of subjective value theory develops the same point. Kaufmann treats ambiguities in economic theory as symptoms of a broader methodological danger: confusing relations among meanings with assertions about the world. A proposition may be necessarily true because of how its terms are fixed, but that necessity is not empirical confirmation. Likewise, an empirical generalization may be useful without being logically indubitable.

The thesis that they are indubitably true is one more instance of the confusion of matters of fact and relations of meanings.

The book’s core conceptual move is thus a disciplined separation of levels: facts, meanings, rules of procedure, and formal relations. Kaufmann does not deny that social phenomena involve meanings, values, and purposive action. Rather, he argues that these features make methodological clarification more urgent. The social sciences require neither metaphysical foundations nor loosened standards, but a careful account of how their propositions function.

Its continuing relevance is that it offers a logical-empiricist reconstruction of social inquiry without naïve positivism. Kaufmann’s objectivity is procedural, not absolute; his formalism is clarificatory, not reductive. The monograph’s contribution is to show that the methodology of the social sciences must begin by asking what kind of claim is being made and under what rules it may be accepted, revised, or rejected.