ABSTRACT
The social scientists who follow Durkheim and the other positivists’ lead in taking the “hard sciences” as their model put particular emphasis in the objectivity of social facts and observation procedures: hence the objectivist label that is frequently applied to them. Among adherents of objectivism, some are distinguished by the fact of regarding only actual behavior as “objective” and thus worthy of study; the legitimacy of using “subjective” indicators based on individuals’ ratings has been argued at length, e.g., in the work on economic behavior that began in the 1940s. In the relational and process-centered conception of social reality, the object of study takes shape on the basis of the researcher’s axiological, substantive and methodological point of view: as Nicola Abbagnano wrote: “the social fact is to be understood as the possibility that an object X will be recognized as such by adequate means”.
