Lecture VI

Today I want to discuss some general questions concerning the methods and character of the social sciences. Empiricist philosophers of science, from Mill to the logical empiricists, have tended to take physics as the Platonic idea of a science, and to look forward to the happy day when the social sciences would, by the grace of the ‘scientific method’, look just like physics. Mill’s statement that ‘the backward state of the Moral Sciences can only be remedied by applying to them the methods of Physical Science, duly extended and generalized’ ¹ sets the tone; Zilsel’s statements that ‘by collecting and comparing the material with philological accuracy historical laws will be discovered at last not by general methodological discussions like ours’; ² and that ‘physics is the most mature of all empirical sciences as to method. In physics the law-concept has been used for three hundred years. It is to be assumed, therefore, that most of the difficulties in its application to other fields have their physical counterpart and can be clarified most easily with the help of physical concepts’; ³ and Nagel’s statement that ‘there appears to be no good reason for claiming that the general pattern of explanations in historical inquiry, or the logical structure of the conceptual tools employed in it, differs from those encountered in the generalizing and the natural science’ ⁴ only reaffirm Mill’s assertion in various modern accents. The emphasis on physics is revealed by the fact that Nagel, immediately after making the statement just quoted, goes on to say that the ‘explanatory premisses in history’ include laws ‘as well as many explicitly (although usually incompletely) formulated singular statements of initial conditions’. ‘Law’ and ‘initial conditions’ are physicist’s jargon, after all, and not any historian’s way of speaking.