Felix Kaufmann’s scholarly article develops a conception of methodology as the clarification of scientific presuppositions and rules of inquiry. Its four sections move from the social sciences’ uncertainty about their foundations, through principles of empirical knowledge and their implications for explanation, to a comparison with physics and a constructive account of scientific controls. The central argument rejects both philosophical guarantees of social laws and disciplinary isolation: social inquiry has distinctive requirements, but shares with other empirical sciences a revisable, interconnected structure of knowledge.
Section I traces a recurring movement from disappointed theory to philosophical dogmatism and then to demands for disciplinary autonomy. Changing circumstances expose the limits of assumptions previously treated as universal, as when imperfect competition requires modifications to classical economics. Demands for “purity of method” usefully distinguish disciplinary questions and prevent concepts from being transplanted indiscriminately. Yet complete isolation obscures the common presuppositions through which different sciences investigate the same world. The person who paints a picture, exchanges it, and satisfies hunger remains genuinely the same person across different scientific descriptions.
Kaufmann distinguishes levels of presupposition: logical, empirical, biological, those concerning thinking beings, and those specific to a particular social domain. Methodology makes these dependencies available for criticism without dissolving disciplinary differences.
We may say that the main task of methodology is to make the implicit presuppositions of scientific thinking explicit and to bring them into coherence with one another.
This task does not require a privileged philosophical access to truth. Kaufmann accepts that knowledge entails possible control and that clarification belongs within scientific thinking. A relatively independent methodology is justified technically, through the division of intellectual labor: specialized researchers need assistance in understanding assumptions extending beyond their immediate fields.
Section II presents principles of empirical knowledge before applying them to familiar methodological controversies. Scientific assertions require observational tests, including sensory perception and introspection, and anticipate further observations rather than merely recording present experience. Knowledge therefore neither begins without presuppositions nor reaches an unrevisable conclusion. Even perception and recollection remain open to correction; experiences supply materials for cognition, but truth and falsity belong to judgments subject to controls.
It follows that in scientific thinking there can be no isolated judgment; each stands within a system (though not a finished system) of other judgments.
This systemic account joins fallibility to coherence. Mathematical definitions cannot establish irrefutable facts about reality, and mathematical expression does not confer certainty on empirical laws. Laws must license inference from finitely ascertainable facts to further facts. Protecting them against every discrepancy through unrestricted qualifications such as “all other things being equal” turns them into conventions rather than empirical assertions.
These principles recast determinism as a question about the extent and precision of prediction, not an opposition between absolute necessity and freedom. They also separate questions of responsibility and legal policy from questions of causation. Against behaviorism and physicalism, Kaufmann argues that interpreting human conduct necessarily draws upon self-observation. Introspection is neither dispensable nor immune to criticism: internal and external evidence can control one another.
The converse error is to treat understanding motives as independent of external causal knowledge. Purposive conduct presupposes beliefs about how particular means produce intended effects.
It follows that the "understanding" of human behavior is not coordinate with the explanation of natural science, but that, since it is the more complex process, it includes the latter.
Teleological explanation consequently combines the motivational causation involved in establishing a goal with the causation through which means produce results. This analysis also informs Kaufmann’s treatment of values. Many apparently objective value judgments concern suitable means to deeply entrenched ends; their unquestioned acceptance creates an appearance of absolute rightness. He denies an independent source of value cognition, while recognizing that historically situated value utterances can disclose important psychological and sociological evidence.
Section III challenges the image of physics shared by many naturalists and anti-naturalists. Both camps often assume that physical laws possess mathematical certainty, then debate whether social inquiry can attain it. Once this premise is removed, comparison becomes more discriminating: simplicity, theoretical organization, predictive range, and precision must be examined separately. Ordinary reliance on postal services and railways demonstrates that social organization permits reliable predictions without detailed knowledge of individual participants.
Objectivity likewise divides into distinct problems: the observer’s spatial and temporal position, psychological influences on selection and causal interpretation, and the incorporation of value judgments. Methodology does not create these complications; it reveals features already operative in research.
Section IV turns to modern axiomatics and proof theory as models of explicit procedure, while insisting on substantial modification for empirical inquiry. Unlike mathematical theorems, empirical statements can be admitted and later withdrawn. Basic hypotheses remain revisable; controls assign different weights to different statements; and general assertions require controls distinguishable from those governing particular cases.
On the whole, in every empirical science it is necessary to distinguish between the conditions under which a statement is admitted into science and the conditions under which the statement, once admitted, will remain, while in mathematics every proved statement belongs to science for good.
The analogy of a club—with admission, exclusion, membership ranks, and weighted votes—makes this organization intelligible. Questions about whether an assertion belongs to a discipline precede, but can overlap with, questions about its truth. Scientific rules also leave room for choice and contain procedures for their own alteration. Kaufmann’s concluding comparison with law thus presents methodology as a “half rigid” order: responsive to changing purposes, yet sufficiently determinate to guide criticism. Its relevance lies in replacing polarized methodological doctrines with explicit questions about evidence, disciplinary scope, and the rules governing warranted acceptance.
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