On the Unity of Max Weber's Methodology.

Two years after Max Weber's death, his wife published a collection of his essays on the philosophy of the social sciences under the title "Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre." In these studies, Weber developed his views on what in the parlance of the time, were termed the logical and methodological issues of the social sciences: the demarcation between the natural sciences and the social sciences; the status of the concepts of culture and history; the theory of action and agency; the relationship between explanation and interpretation; and the complex of questions posed by tile fact that the subject matter, problems, and theoretical interests of the social sciences are in some sense defined by values. Weber unified the two perspectives by developing a theory of explanation as interpretation. In his reconstruction of Weber's methodology, the objective of cultural and socially science is causal explanation. However, the product of such an explanation is not a generalization or law-like statement but a singular causal analysis. Causal explanation in the social sciences does not link effects to their empirically necessary or sufficient conditions, but determines why a specific constellation of acts and artifacts has the properties it exhibits instead of others, why a certain historical path or outcome was what it was, and not something else.