ABSTRACT
The possibility of human predictability implies a number of ontological conceptions of human capacity. Most importantly such prediction relies upon the reality of one sort of causal mechanism: human intention and agency. Human subjectivity and agency, it is sometimes argued, are responsible for an inherent unpredictability in social reality; ergo the impossibility of social science. In the case of the social sciences particularly, the imbrication of scientists with their subject matter may function as an even greater epistemological obstacle and allegedly scientific knowledges turn out to be ideological mystifications. Considering social science in this light opens up a new perspective upon its history. Consider, for example, the directly contrasting positions of the classical sociologists E. Durkheim and M. Weber. The methodological prescription 'treat social facts as things' is thus, as Durkheim articulated it, at once too broad and too narrow. Weber insists that social reality is fundamentally composed of the actions of human beings.
