Materialism and Social Inquiry in the Continental Tradition in Philosophy by Andrew M. Koch

Author:Andrew M. Koch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Methodological Individualism and Subjective Nature of Experience

Social science is the interpretive study of individuals in a social context. Social actions are defined as those actions which are affected by the existence and behavior of others.[30] But as with the creative process of intuition, only individuals have experiences and motives. Only individuals perform actions. Social science finds it useful to employ collective concepts in explaining action, but “collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action.”[31]

Weber’s goal in social scientific research is, therefore, to understand the subjectively meaningful motives and goals of individuals acting in a social context. “Laws” of historic and social change can never convey the uniqueness of subjective meaning, nor the richness of historic events. “Laws” are not the goals of Weber’s sociology, as they must be so general in character that they cannot contain significant content.[32] The complexity of an historical event is never conveyed by the search for regularity, but only in the explanation of its unique character.

There is another aspect to this rejection of “laws” as the goals of Weber’s analysis. The search for laws in the explanation of human behavior implies that there exists an objective level at which analysis can occur outside of a subjective orientation on the part of the investigator and the subject. Weber rejects this idea.

The search for some objective totality is outside the parameters of human understanding. The individual is not able to grasp the infinite complexity of social and historic reality. Subjective interpretation is therefore necessary. The subjectivity of the human experience is clearly portrayed in Weber’s description of culture. “Culture is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.”[33] There is no objective meaning in history. History is significant only to the extent that people consider it so. All history and culture is meaningful only because human beings consider it to be so.

What process occurs in order for the individual to have any objective knowledge of culture from the subjective participation in experience? It should already be clear that the idea of “objective knowledge” has a very qualified meaning in Weber’s work. Objective knowledge is not to be equated with “total” or “perfect” knowledge in any way.

If the mind constructs images of reality out of the infinite complexity of experience in order to orient the individual to the empirical world, then that process is objective in the sense that subjective sensation has been processed, sorted, and categorized as meaningful experience by the mind. Following the Kantian epistemology, experience must be objectified before it can be turned into knowledge. Sensation must be mediated, turned into a cognition. It is different from raw sensation. Knowledge of things and events is knowledge that has gone through the process of reflection.

Conceptual knowledge [gedankliche Erkenntnis], even of one’s own experience, is nowhere and never

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