ABSTRACT
The first of these topics is the issue, as it is traditionally described, between those who enthuse over a Verstehen way of doing social science and those who aspouse the alternative method of Erklären. The terms are German and they mean respectively ‘to understand’ and ‘to explain’. A Verstehen approach to the study of human beings is any which assumes that the inquiry cannot be modelled on natural science: any ‘humanistic’ or ‘nonscientistic’ approach, to use other terms in common employment; an Erklären approach is one which makes the contrary assumption. Nineteenth-century German opponents of scientism often expressed their claim in the assertion that making sense of human beings was a matter of Verstehen, making sense of natural things one of Erklären, and that the two operations were fundamentally distinct.
