Felix Kaufmann · 1939
Kaufmann’s journal article develops a program for cooperation in the social sciences through the clarification of scientific rules. Its three sections move from the critique of apriorism and relativism, through the problem of value judgments, to a practical agenda for methodological research. The central claim is that methodological disputes need not remain expressions of irreconcilable political outlooks: analysis can expose the standards scholars already accept and distinguish genuine disagreements from logical errors, ambiguous definitions, and exaggerated explanatory claims.
Section I acknowledges that political commitments influence research and can obstruct intellectual cooperation. Yet their influence does not make methodological criticism futile. Scholars with similar political aims also disagree about methods, while intellectually sincere opponents can recognize inconsistencies between their procedures and their professed standards.
The crucial point, however, is this: to think scientifically is to submit implicitly to definite rules.
Methodology therefore makes commitments explicit rather than imposing an external philosophical authority. Kaufmann proposes a “Socratic method,” refined by logical analysis, through which researchers reconsider what they mean by deduction, induction, and empirical evidence. His principal targets are apriorism, which claims knowledge of reality immune to empirical testing, and relativism, which treats fundamental disagreements as theoretically irresolvable differences of outlook. Despite their opposition, both mistakenly admit assertions about reality beyond scientific control.
The distinction between basic assumptions and conventions is decisive. Assumptions may initially lack proof, but remain subject to observational testing. Conventions determine how scientific propositions are formulated and are not themselves assertions about reality. Kaufmann further distinguishes “basic rules,” governing truth and falsity, from “preference rules,” guiding choices among otherwise admissible hypotheses, methods, and definitions. Preference rules express aims such as simplicity, wide applicability, predictive reliability, and systematic unity.
Decisions as to the preferability of conventions are, by definition, subject not to criteria of truth, but to criteria of usefulness for the aims of the science in question.
A convention can consequently be non-arbitrary without becoming a factual proposition. The choice of measurement units may be arbitrary, whereas choosing a heliocentric reference system is justified by simpler equations. Similarly, definitions are neither true nor false, but can be assessed for precision, compatibility with established usage, and scientific fruitfulness. Disputes over words may conceal substantive questions about which properties deserve selection. Kaufmann rejects both the dogmatist’s derivation of political conclusions from the supposedly true meaning of “society” or “justice” and the dismissal of every conceptual dispute as empty verbalism. Changing definitions can also turn former definitions into assertions, making historical shifts in terminology a source of methodological confusion.
Section II extends this analysis to values. Rejecting a transcendent realm of goodness or beauty does not render evaluative questions meaningless. Explicit criteria permit criticism of judgments as inconsistent, empirically untenable, incomplete, or discordant with the evaluator’s actual practice. Rational discussion need not produce universal agreement, but relativism understates the agreement it can achieve.
When objective criteria are given for the truth or falsity of value judgments such judgments have their legitimate place in science.
The demand for value-free science thus concerns intersubjective control, not a conventional ban on evaluative propositions. A report that someone prefers an electoral system is distinguishable from a judgment that the system is more just: the latter claims correctness beyond a private emotional state. Its scientific standing depends on shared criteria for evaluating justice. Axiology, like methodology, reconstructs rules implicit in actual practice while distinguishing conformity to those rules from the psychological or social origins of judgments. Disagreement alone does not establish the impossibility of objectivity.
Section III translates these distinctions into six interconnected tasks: assess existing results and methods for reliability; analyze other methods against the rules thereby elicited; reformulate problems more precisely and modestly; organize unsolved problems and identify relevant evidence; investigate technical terms and their historical changes; and compile fallacies according to the rules violated. Rules and research procedures must undergo reciprocal adjustment rather than form a fixed hierarchy.
The longest discussion concerns explanation. Kaufmann asks researchers to specify what requires explanation, which facts supply it, which laws connect those facts, and what the explanation is expected to accomplish. An apparent anomaly often depends on unstated expectations about normal conduct or typical human aims. Political commitments may legitimately guide explanatory selection, but do not justify exclusive claims. In particular, showing that a condition was necessary for an event does not establish that it was sufficient or that it could support prediction.
Social inquiry must also moderate its expectations of precision and strictness. Economic theory often supplies directional relationships rather than exact quantitative forecasts. Strictness concerns how decisively contrary instances disqualify a statement, not metaphysical necessity. The distinction between natural laws and social rules consequently concerns standards of control and tolerated exceptions, rather than an absolute opposition between causality and freedom.
Kaufmann closes by calling for interdisciplinary training and coordinated inquiry, with economics and the sociology of knowledge as promising starting points. Methodology matters because organizing available knowledge improves both criticism and practical judgment under political pressure:
Never is deliberateness more needed than in the midst of panic; never is clarity more essential than in times of upheaval.
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