Felix Kaufmann, Remarks on Methodology of the Social Sciences (1936)

Kaufmann’s journal article argues that methodological progress in the social sciences requires making implicit assumptions explicit, replacing speculative oppositions with precise comparisons of research procedures.

The opening section uses developments in physics to dismantle the contrast between necessary natural laws and inherently imprecise social knowledge. Mathematical certainty does not transfer to empirical propositions, while uncertainty about a proposition’s truth need not prevent its clear formulation.

An incorrect statement need not be less clearly formulated than a correct statement; a supposition or a doubt can be expressed just as clearly as a firm conviction, a set of alternative hypotheses just as clearly as a blank assertion.

Clarity concerns the specification of truth conditions, not guaranteed predictive success. Nor can investigators evade methodological questions by appealing to bare facts: recognizing physical events as human actions already involves interpretation and accumulated experience.

Section 2 rejects both claims to infallible social understanding and the relativistic conclusion that knowledge has no autonomy from practical interests. Immediately grasping someone’s behaviour may indicate a correct interpretation, but does not establish its correctness. Accepted assumptions remain open to empirical testing even when a particular investigation provisionally exempts them. Likewise, naturalism and antinaturalism obscure the specific question of where physical and social inquiry share procedures and where they diverge.

Section 3 identifies a consequential difference: social inquiry lacks the unified hierarchy of laws available to physics. Investigators must seek partial interconnections, making problem selection and methodological reflection especially important. Practical interests influence which questions are asked, but do not determine what counts as an adequate answer.

But it can by no means be inferred from the establishment of this logical independence that there exists also causal independence between the theoretical research work and these practical interests.

This distinction grounds Kaufmann’s reading of Weber’s ethical neutrality: researchers must exclude considerations justified only by desired practical outcomes. Neutrality does not prohibit studying valuations. Value judgments presuppose systems of ends, and sociology should expose those systems rather than reproduce their claims to unconditional authority. Kaufmann distinguishes reports of personal liking from judgments claiming objective worth, whose implicit standards require analysis.

Sections 4 and 5 bring interpretation within empirical inquiry without reducing social facts to bodily movements or isolated mental states.

The interpretation of meaning is always a synthesis of internal and external experience, and accordingly, concepts of social facts must be constructed out of concepts of physical and of psychophysical facts.

Words and other human products function as symptoms of mental processes through empirical connections, not through membership in an autonomous realm of meaning. Distinguishing a cause from evidence of that cause remains essential, but does not require separate ontological worlds. Kaufmann’s example of a naval distress signal separates deciphering its words, grasping its request, explaining the emergency, and inferring the sender’s ignorance of war.

Drawing on Schütz, Kaufmann further distinguishes interpreting people immediately present, distant contemporaries, and people of the past. Objectivity requires identifying what remains invariant across differences in the observer’s position. Similarly, disputes between analytical and historical economics become questions about abstraction, generality, and empirical checking rather than irreconcilable philosophies.

Section 6 applies this clarification to collectivities and competing claims for the primacy of society or the individual.

The concepts of social collectivities, like society, state and economy, can acquire a precise meaning only in terms of specific relations between individual persons.

Kaufmann separates logical complexity and independence from genetic, methodological, and axiological priority. Statements about social wholes concern individual behaviour, yet different scales of inquiry can coexist. Giving society ethical precedence expresses a hierarchy of practical ends, not a conclusion deducible from theory.

The final section proposes comparing methods through the knowledge assumed, needed, and acquired in setting, working out, and solving problems. Coordinated criteria of proof and disproof could connect inquiries, strengthen statistical research, and cultivate intellectual integrity; achieving this requires organized collaboration rather than a single universally prescribed method.