A Weber for the Right-Thinking

II. Max Weber's Methodology: A Guide to the Perplexed?

A Weber for the Right-Thinking*

Stephen Turner

From a certain point of view one can see why Fritz Ringer's Max We-ber's Methodology: the Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences1 wouldbe an attractive book. It appears to be comprehensive. It appears to explaina large number of obscure and difficult texts in short sentences and in termsof relatively simple ideas—even diagrams with arrows. Yet it is not too sim-ple. There is plenty of technical language, and there are references to spe-cialized texts in a number of disciplines in German and English, both onWeber and on issues in the philosophy of science and social science, in-cluding a good deal on some thinkers who arc seldom discussed in theusual literature on the social sciences.

The book thus appears to have the best of several worlds: somethingnew and challenging but nevertheless introductory about Weber's methodo-logical writing, together with something that is also relevant to such issuesof the day as relativism and the divide between the interpretive and causalapproaches to social science. The jacket contains blurbs which call it suchthings as "a major work for the history of the social sciences" and "invalu-able," by people who have familiar names and ought to know. And thebook appears to be a "success." The Front Table, the book newsletter ofthe Seminary Coop Bookstore, among the greatest American academicbookstores, reports that the book is attracting a great deal of attentionthere, and this store has a clientele that represents the sophisticated generalreader that academic authors commonly claim to be writing for. The gen-era! reader is sadly misled.

*Review essay of Fritz Ringer, Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural andSocial Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

This essay was completed while the author was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium forAdvanced Study in the Social Sciences.

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1998

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c 1998 Human Sciences Press. Inc.

BEHINDTHE FACADE

Reading the book from the inside of the Weber literature is a bit likegetting inside the Wizard of Oz's machine along with the wizard and seeinghow the impressive facade is actually manipulated. The wizard, from thispoint of view, is not very impressive. The first indication of trouble is inthe title itself. Weber quite emphatically did not unify the social and cul-tural sciences. He was fascinated with the problem of the relations betweenthe two on many levels, and provided what may still be the best accountof the problem produced by the fact that our ordinary explanations comein the form of reasons and fit the ideological model of intentional expla-nation while our accounts of the natural world and to some extent of hu-man action involve causal explanations. But he saw that the solution to theproblem of the status of intentional or "meaningful action" explanationsled not to unity but So irremediable diversity.

The second sign of trouble is in the blurbs. The first blurb is by DonaldFleming, a Harvard historian who is not a Weber scholar, and indeed isonly marginally connected with the topic. The second is by Dennis Wrong,a NYU sociologist who has not participated in Weber scholarship for manydecades and has played no role in the post-sixties emergence of seriousWeber scholarship, as distinct from the tactical appropriation by sociologistsfor their own purposes characteristic of the fifties. Perhaps their commentscan best be understood as the empty praise of scholarly tourists. The thirdblurb is the most puzzling of all. It comes from Steven Kalberg, a Weberscholar whose sole book is based on the premise that Weber's methodo-logical writings are irrelevant to his actual practice and that Kalberg canbetter explain Weber's true methodology than Weber himself could. IfWeber's methodology is worth taking seriously, Kalberg's work is wrong.

Semiologists of the blurb and Kremlinologists of academic politics mayfind some deeper significance in these statements. Rhetoricians of academicprose are likely to find more material for analysis in. the book itself, whichis a masterpiece of a certain style of snobbish knowingness, a certain partly-conspiratorial, partly-patronizing attitude toward the reader. One simpleexample of this appears in the selected bibliography Ringer provides. Asmall number of old and familiar translations (several of which are wellknown to have problems) are recommended, the rest (including a recenttranslation prize winner such as the Cambridge version of Weber's PoliticalWritings) sniffily written off with the following dictum: "I know of no otherEnglish translations that can be recommended with confidence" (1997:179). Obviously this is not meant as an admission of ignorance. It is.

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The text is unhelpful for the general reader who would like to assessthe claims Ringer makes. Citations are exclusively to the original Germantexts, even where his "recommended" translations are widely available. Theuse of identifying footnotes for every claim or quotation is dispensed with.A typical footnote refers to three or four distinct bits of text, often withlong ranges of pages, so that the reader cannot easily check up on whatWeber himself said, either in translation or in the original. Sometimes thequotations are lengthy, but when they are, they are usually undigested, andthe interpretation is blind to the nuances and complexities of the text.Often there are neither quotations or references. The tone is strictly oneof "Set me explain it to you, since you'll never figure it out yourself on thebasis of what is available to you"; and never "here is the claim, and hereis the evidence for it."

Ringer is nothing if not unhelpful to the reader interested in more.In one case, for example, Dirk Kasler's standard introductory text to Weber,the earlier and uncorrected German version of the text appears in the bib-liography in preference to a later corrected version in English (Kasler, 1989,by Polity and the University of Chicago Press; an even later version in Ger-man, Kasler, 1995, by Campus, is not mentioned).2 Perhaps Ringer simplydidn't know what the publication status of the text was, and didn't botherto find out—or perhaps the text itself was written in the mid-eighties, assome of the passages suggest. In either case, the reader would have beenaided by a small effort on Ringer's part.

Elsewhere, Ringer refers to a paper of mine and Regis Factor's withthe comment that we "have most recently commented upon Weber's con-cepts of 'objective possibility' and 'adequate causation'. . ." (1997: 50). Atage eighteen, the paper hardly qualifies as recent. But the suggestion madeby the comment is more misleading. Wouldn't one interpret such a com-ment as meaning "there is a lot of previous discussion of this topic thatRinger knows about but is too busy to mention, and these are the latestto say something?" This would simply be untrue. There is no serious pre-vious discussion. Like the snide comment on translations, this is pretense.

Passing remarks like this are made throughout the book. They createthe illusion of the author's omniscience, but are really evidence of lack ofeffort. A famous philosopher once told me a story about his time as ajunior faculty member at Columbia. At one social occasion he was askedif he had read a certain book. He replied that he had not. A senior facultymember pulled him aside and instructed him "no matter what, never admitthat you haven't read something." If this is a good rule for Ivy Leaguecocktail parties, it is a poor one for authors, and it is worse yet to hintvaguely at one's familiarity with non-existent books.

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UNSYSTEMATICALLY DISTORTING WEBER

The text itself is a curious mixture of padding, some reasonably goodrecapitulations of weber's arguments, applications of Weber's concepts thatare almost completely uninformative, and a great deal of material thatseems to be there only to illustrate the author's learning but which is eithertotally irrelevant or adds nothing to the argument itself. The first chapter,for example, is largely padding. It is devoted to claims about weber's aca-demic "field" (with genuflections to Bourdieu: even habitus is later in-voked). Individuals he takes to be emblematic of this milieu, such asWindelband, Ranke, Droysen, and Wundt are mentioned, quoted, andopined about. But why? The discussion begs the obviously relevant histori-cal question of whether they were actually of interest to Weber, read byhim, understood by him, or taken seriously by him. If they were not. whyare they discussed at all? Do they merely represent parts of the Zeitgeistin which Weber was educated? If so, why are these parts the relevant ones?

Ringer never begins to think through such questions. Yet the historicalproblem of Weber's relation to neo-Kantianism is implicitly raised byRinger himself as a result of his own lengthy treatment of the topic in thefirst chapter, and his extensive discussion, in the second, on Weber's ad-aptation of Rickert. In the second chapter, Ringer strives to underminethe claim that Weber was influenced by neo-Kantianism. He claims to agreewith various worthies, such as Dieter Henrich, who "emphasizes Weber'slack of interest in epistemological issues, his commonsense realism aboutthe past, and his indifference to Rickert's obsession with the possibility oftranscendentally valid cultural norms" (1997: 51). So, what is it?: If Rickertand epistemology didn't matter to Weber, what did, and why does the bookspend so much time on what didn't matter?

The serious historical problems here are simply waved away by Ringer,and this waving away is repeated over and over again in the text. The fol-lowing aside is typical: "As Friedrich Tenbruck has argued this vital elementin Weber's conceptual apparatus [ideal-types] almost certainly owed moreto Carl Menger than to any other source" (1997: 51). Maybe. But howcould this claim be substantiated; and if it could be, what does this suggestabout Weber's "field" or context and about what really interested him inthe methodological writings that Ringer's book is ostensibly about? If it istrue, why don't we have a book about Menger and the economic contextof Weber's methodological thinking—rather than lengthy, catty, attacks onthose writings—like those of Guy Oakes, who have made an attempt tounderstand the sources that Weber himself gives?

The bottom line is this. Questions about Weber's sources and contextare never answered, even though there are credible different answers read-

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ily available in the literature. We get, instead, Ringer's personal, unsup-ported opinions about such largely meaningless questions of influence-ac-counting as whether "Weber . . . owed more to Menger than to Jellinek,"who also used the term "ideal-type" (1997: 111). The work of explainingthe issues that motivated Menger and Jellinek, and how these issues relatedto Weber, is never done.

Complaints about the silences of a text of this sort may appear to belittle more than quibbling. No academic text can answer all the questionsit implicitly raises, though it must be said that Ringer lets himself open forthis kind of criticism, since he is free with comments like "Hennis . . . hasalmost nothing to say on these subjects" (1997: 60, cf. similar commentson Tenbruck, 61). But the problem is more serious than authorial rudenessand reflexive inconsistency: much of the text consists of material whosepresence, and therefore relevance, is a mystery. Among the other mysteri-ous presences is a lengthy discussion of the secondary literature on David-son during the rationality and relativism discussions of the early eighties,and an even longer excursion into the thinking of Wesley Salmon,3 eachof which I will examine in more detail below. A detailed examination ofthese two excursions will show how the text was constructed, or rather cob-bled together.

But it docs not show why. The larger mystery is this: what motivatedthis book, and what is it that Ringer thinks he has added to an immensepreexisting literature? There is little agonistic engagement with the argu-ments of predecessors, except for the discussion of Oakes and some com-mentary on a very small number of texts, some of which are very dated.There is little sense that the extant secondary literature constitutes a co-herent whole, with a series of standard problems reaching back to the timeof Weber himself. Indeed, references to this vast literature, some of whichis beautifully clear and accessible prose by the best philosophers of thecentury, such as Karl Lowith, are few.

If the aim is simply to provide a fresh explication of Weber's meth-odological writings,4 the text is not simply a bad book, but something worse,because some of the text is right. But a good deal of the text is half right,but half right in precisely the dangerous way that creates the appearanceof being actually right, while through sloppiness and misleading expressionsuggests things that are actually very wrong. The problem is pervasive. Sug-gestio falsi, suppressio veri seems to be Ringer's motto.

One of the more egregious but nevertheless illustrative examples isRinger's repeated reference to "immediate experience" (1997: 57, 71) and"experience" (1997: 76 and elsewhere). Ringer writes as though Weber wasa great believer in something called "immediate experience," used the termin the technical, foundational way that it has been used for centuries in

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philosophy, and used it in various specific ways to justify his methodologicalclaims (1997: 71). The problem with this interpretation is that though We-ber uses the term "experience" to make various distinctions, he nowheretalks about immediate experience in this way; does not seem to think thatthere is any such thing as a preconceptualized, inference-free, immediateexperience of the sort that the philosophical tradition refers to and whichis evoked by the use of this technical epistemological term; and in any case,does not consider "experience" to be an important category for the purposeof grounding or providing a foundation for knowledge claims.

In fact, an epistemology of "immediate experience" is alien to Weber,and it would be quite radical to claim that he had one. The usual educatedreader with no knowledge of Weber would not know this, however. Whatthey would know is that the valorization of immediate experience as theabsolute and indubitable foundation of knowledge, the "Otto sees a redcube" of Logical Positivism, is a basic doctrinal element in modern thought.So its appearance in this context is very striking. What could Ringer meanby appealing to this notion? Does he in fact propose a radical reinterpre-tation of Weber? Or is this simply an example of Ringer not understandingthe implications of what he is saying? He says more than enough on thesubject to raise the question. As we have seen, Ringer endorses Henrichfor stressing Weber's commonsense realism about the past. The educatedreader would naturally wonder how this could conceivably be reconciledwith the valorization of immediate experience—commonsense realism and"immediate experience" empiricism are usually taken to be opposites. Butno reconciliation is forthcoming.

One wonders whether Ringer simply doesn't mean what he is saying,and that this kind of comment is the result of haste, sloppy editing or think-ing, inattention, or sheer ignorance. Yet the strong philosophical implica-tions of these claims about immediate experience seem clear, even toRinger. At one point Ringer explicitly comments that "In Weber's view,causa! 'moments' are not simply given in immediate experience; they areconstructs. On the one hand, we analyze the given into 'components,' 'iso-lating possible causes from the vast complex of surrounding antecedent con-ditions" (1997: 71). The passage is misleading on several counts, but thegrammar of the sentences is not: Ringer identifies immediate experiencewith "the given" (which I, not Ringer, have emphasized here). "The given"is a technical philosophical usage. Indeed, its technical use should be fa-miliar to Ringer, since it is such a prominent term in his own milieu: therefutation of the "myth of the given" was a major concern of Ringer's late,and great, colleague at Pittsburgh, Wilfred Sellars. So a slightly more so-phisticated general reader would naturally conclude that Ringer is attrib-uting to Weber a doctrine about the given, understood as the contents of

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immediate experience, which are distinguished from "constructs" such as"causal moments."

But this would be a mistake. In the first place, there is no seriousthesis about Weber here. Weber simply has no doctrine of immediate ex-perience as the given, from which "constructs" are then made. In this case,the issue is straightforward. Weber generally held that our ordinary expe-rience of the world was shaped by our worldviews, culture, and the like(notably our purposes organized into disciplinary activities), and never ex-pressed the contrary claim that there is a special virtue to the pheno-menological sense of immediacy, much less that it signaled that what weexperience "immediately" was true in a sense unmediated by culture orconcepts and thus nonrelative or culture free, or that culture was some-thing that we somehow added to our experience to make or construct itinto something else. So in Ringer's text a serious distortion of Weber'sviews has been introduced without any textual argument or explicationwhatsoever.

What is one to make of this? It would be possible to "analyze" allthese claims of Ringer's and show them to be incoherent, but it would alsobe largely beside the point. What Ringer does here and elsewhere in thetext is to restate and describe Weber's position in his own language, whichis a peculiar compound of Weber's language and language which Weberdid not use and, as in this case, would not have used. The misuse of theterm "immediate experience" may seem like an insanely subtle point, andindeed Ringer does nothing with this notion other than to use it to restateWeber. He erects no grand thesis on it, and little would be lost if the sen-tences using it were simply scratched out.

And this is itself revealing. Nothing follows, even for Ringer, fromthese novel interpretations. Even the misuses and semi-misrepresentationsdo not hang together. Consider another misrepresentation, one that is alittle more serious. Ringer says repeatedly that Weber has a dynamic viewof causal processes, and Ringer repeatedly refers to such processes asthough there were, so to speak, real things called "processes" that Weberwas theorizing about. Indeed, it would not be too strong to say that Ringerspeaks as though Weber had a metaphysical view of history as consistingof dynamic processes. Leave aside for now the problem that Weber, asRinger himself acknowledges (though perhaps not with full comprehen-sion), denounces conceptions of this sort (1997: 112). How does this con-ception of the past, with its real processes, fit either with commonsenserealism about the past or with an epistemology of immediate experienceas the given? It could perhaps be made, with enormous effort, to fit. ButRinger is not engaged in hermeneutic heroics, and makes no effort at all.We are left with a muddle.

A Weber for the Right-Thinking 2S9

SALMON, STATISTICAL RELEVANCE THEORY, AND SINGULARCAUSAL EXPLANATIONS

Perhaps Ringer's insouciance about epistemology is justified by We-ber's alleged lack of interest in the subject, and his, and Ringer's, interestin other subjects. To the extent that there is a coherent thesis in the book,it is in relation to causality. Weber, Ringer says, is a causalist, and perhapswhat he means is that interpretivism is the wrong handle to grab in orderto understand Weber. This would at least give the book a motive: it couldbe seen as a corrective to the appropriation of Weber by "soft-methods"sociologists. And it is to Ringer's credit that he recognizes the significance,for Weber, of the role of probabilistic causa! thinking in his methodologicalwritings and (more equivocally) in his substantive historical analyses, andspecifically of the problem of the interpretation of singular causal state-ments. Yet even here Ringer manages to miss the point (and in the courseof doing so to seriously distort Weber).

Ringer uses the language and framework of Wesley Salmon's discus-sions of probabilistic explanation in terms of the distinction between sta-tistical relevance and causal relevance. Causal probabilistic relevance, forSalmon, is something very similar to what von Kries (on whom Weber re-lied) had in mind when he talked about objective possibility and adequatecause, and the two approaches share a host of technical problems. Someof the problems are eye-glazing, I am sorry to say; but the basic issues canbe kept simple. Relations of "statistical relevance," in Salmon's terminol-ogy, are relationships in which members of a particular class, such as adultmales, have a particular dependent probability of some kind of event, suchas the probability of death in the present year. Every subclass of adult maleshas a death rate, but the additional fact of membership in a particularsub-class, such as the class of adult male smokers, may or may not be sta-tistically relevant. If membership in that subclass does not increase or de-crease the death rate, it is not statistically relevant.

Lack of statistical relevance is evidence of lack of causal relevance;statistical relevance is a condition of causal relevance without necessarilybeing evidence of causal relevance. The distinction is parallel to, and per-haps is best understood as a form of, the problem of cause and correlation,and the literature on this problem indicates many qualifications that needto be added to the analysis if it is to be applied to real data, not least theconsideration that actual causal effects may cancel one another out andthus not appear as associations. I will ignore these refinements in favor ofmore pressing issues.

The pressing issue for any approach of this sort is this: many subclassmemberships may be associated with an outcome and increase the likelihood

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of, in the simple sense of "enable better predictions of" an outcome, withoutbeing the cause of an outcome. Consider the death rate for human beingswho wear size 46 long suit jackets. Large men are likely to have a higherdeath rate than comparable populations. Death rates for men are higherthan for women, and overweight people have higher death rates than normaland underweight people. But wearing the jacket itself is not causally relevantto the death rate: wearing the jacket isn't what kills anyone, and if throughsome peculiar change in fashion large numbers of normal weight individualsand women began wearing size 46 suit jackets there would be no reason toexpect their death rate to change.

Obviously this distinction between causal and non-causal relations isa crucial idea in the use of causal terms in relation to probabilities, but itis nevertheless an exceedingly puzzling and difficult one. The problem isrooted in the problem of saying why any regularity is causal, and traditionalphilosophy of science has had plenty of difficulty solving that problem aswell. However, the problem in experimental sciences is soluble, in a prac-tical way, by adding conditions that exclude non-causal relations. One caninsist, for example, that only statistical relations that hold up under experi-mental conditions, such as putting size 46 suit jackets on persons whosesizes are randomized in double-blind experiments, should count as causal.And one might add more stringent conditions, such as the provision ofsome sort of additional explanation in terms of a mechanism or in termsof accepted physical theory. If a relationship met these conditions and thesubclass probabilities were different from those for the class as a whole,the difference would be evidence that the mechanism actually operates toproduce effects.

These particular ad hoc "added conditions" strategies are of courseunavailable in the social sciences and most obviously unavailable in thecases of intentional action and historical causation that are of interest toWeber. But one might imagine a highly general theoretical distinction be-tween causal processes and causal pseudo-processes that was applicable toboth the case of intentional action and physical phenomena that was insome way informative about the social sciences, about the distinction be-tween the social and natural sciences, and the like. Salmon himself wrestledwith a particular set of puzzle cases involving physical phenomena, andcame up with a solution, which Ringer describes at length, to the problemof distinguishing statistical relevance and causal relevance in these cases(1997: 86-91).

Ringer does not limit his discussion of causal process to Salmon. Healso cites various other philosophers, such as MacIntyre and Mackie, tosupport something like the notion of a train of events (1997: 84). This toois a notion of process, and Ringer is insistent that there is something special


here, a "dynamic aspect" (Ringer's emphasis) (1997: 84) that illuminatesthe "notion of human action that affects the environment, and that thus'makes a difference' in the 'course of events'" (1997: 83). What he meansby dynamic is obscure, though the term arises repeatedly. He remarks thatWeber was comfortable with "historians describing events as 'pressing to-ward' some particular outcome, citing 'developmental tendencies, 'movingforces' and even 'impeding' factors in the course of history" (1997: 76).

Ringer adds that "Weber merely urged that such expressions not beheld to represent 'real causal interconnections' at an "elementary" level,but as tactically useful constructs" (1997: 76). But this "merely" raises itsown problems. Docs Weber think that these terms are always metaphors,and potentially misleading ones? Or does he simply wish to say "use them,"but that using such terms has no implications for metaphysics? Does hewish to say that such terms are necessary for the historian, and that appealsto dynamic processes, trains of events, and the like are entailed by historicalanalysis? Ringer's suggestio is that they do, but he doesn't quite say it. Heinstead appeals to Salmon, who appears to have a distinctive conceptionof causal process, and more importantly, a distinction between genuinecausal processes and pseudo-processes.

What is Salmon's concept of a genuine causal process? Salmon asksus to imagine a light projected on a surface in which the spinning diskproduces the appearance of a flash of light chasing another flash of light.The appearances of the two Sights are obviously going to be statisticallyrelevant to one another, since when one appears the other one does aswell. There is no causal relationship between the two appearances of light,in the sense that the one appearance has no actual causal effect on theother appearance even though the statistical relationship between the twois close.

Originally, Salmon argued, based largely on his analysis of this caseof a pseudo-process masquerading as a genuine causal process, that oneneeds spatiotemporal continuity in addition to statistical relevance forcausal relevance. The fact that the two lights apparently chasing one an-other have no direct physical link between them assures that they cannotbe the causes of one another's behavior. The real causal process is to befound in the mechanism of projection, where there is physical continuity.The criteria works more or less well in the case of size 46 suit jackets aswell. On a suitably micro level, that is to say in terms of the biochemistryand pathology that produces the actual deaths that make up the death rate,there is no direct spatiotemporal link between the suit jackets and the bio-logical processes that produce death. One could imagine, if one is a bit ofa biological fantasist, such a link. For example one could imagine thewearers of these suit jackets were deprived of necessary sunlight and this

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somehow disrupted a normal physiological process frequently enough orstrongly enough to increase the death rate. But to reason thus would beto supply a spatiotemporal link between the suit jacket and the process.

It should be obvious why this is completely useless as a criterion inthe social sciences. In these examples one already knows and understandsthe physical mechanisms that make up the causal processes in question.Indeed, one has to have an understanding of a rather advanced sort of theprecise details of the relevant causal mechanisms and how they might be"interfered with" in order to produce the relevant outcome. In the casesof interest to Weber, however, one is dealing with the "mechanism" of thehuman mind. There is in some sense spatiotemporal continuity betweenthe events that might involve the formation of intentions, but these turnout to be quite useless in cutting down the vast number of potential rela-tionships of statistical relevance that might be made to apply to a particularcase.

Suppose that one were to claim, quite reasonably, that the Frenchrevolutionaries were inspired by the reading of the classics and particularlyby Greek and Roman examples of political heroism and even political form.One might say then that reading the classics in this case contributed to thecausa! outcome of the French revolution. In some sense, of course, thecriteria of spatiotemporality needs to be met. The French revolutionariesneeded to have access to the classics in some form and there needed tobe some causal process, such as reading in texts, or hearing stories, whichenabled them to assimilate the lessons of the classics. But this extendedsense of spatiotemporality makes a muddle of the whole issue of causalrelevance, as we will see.

To say anything remotely interesting about the relationship betweenthe classics and the French Revolution requires one to get into the headsof the revolutionaries and understand their actual intentions and how theywere formed. The classics might have appeared to them to be a negativeexample to be avoided. The reason we know it was not was that we havetheir paintings, their professions of intentions, their attempts to use thenames of Roman heros as pseudonyms, and so forth. We can constructfrom these facts an interpretation of their beliefs and the process by whichthey were formed. But this construction is aided not a whit by the criterionof spatiotemporality. Within the spatiotemporal domain of the brain, so tospeak, the actions of the original Caius Gracchus, as represented in memoryor thought, can be the cause of (in the sense of increasing the probabilityof) the actions of Caius Gracchus Babeuf. So spatiotemporality thus con-strued is a notion of astonishing limited significance in relation to humanand historic action, since it is a criterion which allows almost anything, and


certainly anything that fits under the heading of meaningful interpretation,to pass. No one has bothered to claim otherwise.

Ringer, however, thinks that Salmon has something profound to sayto the historian, and that this also illuminates Weber. He portentously tellsus that appealing to Salmon amounts to "interpreting Weber's texts in thelight of convincing present day formulations" which, we are informed (asusual without a citation), "was strongly recommended by Weber himself"(1997: 91). What he finds in Salmon is a notion of casual process, and hethinks that the historian, and Weber, operate with something like this no-tion of causal process.

Salmon, at least in the earlier writings to which Ringer refers, has aparticular problem, as we have seen: to find a criterion to distinguish realprocesses from pseudo-processes, "criteria to distinguish genuine causal in-teractions from mere spacetime interactions'' or coincidental co-locations(Salmon 1994: 298, cf. Ringer, 1997: 88). Salmon's views have undergonea long evolution, which Ringer ignores, but is relevant here. For a longtime Salmon suggested that there had to be what he called a "mark," likethe mark that Lt. Tragg put on evidence in the old Perry Mason shows, ashe once put it, that continued in the process and assured that the continuitywas real. This was the solution to the problem of the dots chasing oneanother around in a circle on the wall. Eventually he gave up on this (asa result of a counterexample), gave up on spatiotemporal continuity gen-erally, and wound up accepting the force of the many refutations of hisexamples, and embraced an argument by one of his critics to the effectthat causal continuity is a matter of the conservation of quantities, such aselectric charge, angular momentum, and the like.

To have a causal process in the sense that he eventually accepts meansthat some quantity is conserved in the next step in a series of physicalmanifestations in objects (1997: 254). This solves the problem of the lightsfollowing one another, since no quantity is conserved, or transmitted, fromthe one dot of light to the other. But it more completely than ever limitsthe relevance of the theory to the natural sciences. Perhaps Wilhelm Ost-wald, the founder of energeticism and the butt of a critique by Weber,could have made something relevant to the social sciences out of this cri-terion for distinguishing genuine causal process, but Weber surely wouldhave had nothing to do with it.

Weber wisely did not go down this path at all. He recognized thatthere were statistical relationships that were not meaningful, and suggestedthat some of them could be made meaningful by constructing an interpre-tation. But he concentrated on the other case, in which relationships thatwere meaningful, such as conventionally intelligible means-end relation-ships between intentions and actions, could also be shown to be in some

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sense statistically genuine, a claim that in a sense validated them empiricallyas causes. Put differently, Weber thought of meaningful interpretations asa window onto causal relationships that could then be seen as either sta-tistically or probabilistically genuine or as false. But like the Jesuit whoconsidered himself to be obliged to believe in hell but not obliged to believethat God put anyone there, Weber was similarly not obliged to believe thatthere were any interpretations that were genuinely adequate at the levelof meaning that were entirely without causa! force, and there is no reasonto believe that he did so.

Ringer, after a great deal of discussion of the technicalities of Salmonon such arcana as the leukemia-producing effects of atomic radiation, es-sentially concedes this—though in a strange backhanded way—in thecourse of a discussion of the rational ideal type, when he acknowledgesthat "deviations from the rationally understandable 'progression'" speci-fied by the type can be ascribed "to divergences between the 'motivations'stipulated in the type and those actually moving the agents "in the analysisof virtually all real actions" (1997: 114). The thought, more simply, is thatin real action explanations, understanding is sufficient, to guarantee thecausal adequacy of the explanation; additional evidence of cause, such asdependent probabilities, adds nothing. And the reason for this is simple:the causes in question may be very low probability causes, but they arecauses nevertheless. This simple idea is the core of Salmon's argument.

So what is the point of Ringer's elaborate discussion? To establish themetaphysical claim that there arc such things as real historical processesafter ail, and that Weber believed in them? This seems to be the best ex-planation and fits with some of the more peculiar passages in the text—suchas one in which he makes a point of the fact that Weber "accepted GeorgSimmel's argument that a long term 'process' of social and individual 'dif-ferentiation' was tending to diversify human orientations" and seizes onother uses of the term "process" by Weber (1997: 135). But what couldthe idea of real historical process mean, in a Weberian sense?

The problem here is a simple one. Weber certainly talks about histori-cal tendencies of various kinds, but is careful not to treat them as inevitableor as otherwise real, much less causally real, because he is well aware thatthese descriptions of tendencies are abstracted descriptions of large num-bers of individual, contingent events, beliefs, and actions. He devotes agreat deal of effort to providing correct analyses of terms that might betaken in the wrong way, such as the notion of interests. One may arguethat this effort is unsuccessful, and that he is unable to avoid the "wrong"interpretation if he wants to draw the conclusions he draws, or that heignores his own methodological strictures. Ringer does not make such anargument. Instead, he wants to argue that "processes" understood in some


special sense follow from Weber's core methodological commitments,especially his account of singular causal statements.

Here we have a deep muddle. As we have seen, Salmon is not veryhelpful, either in the old or the new form. All that can be squeezed fromSalmon on "process" is the idea that there are such things as causa! proc-esses in the case of physical causation. This idea has little to do with thekinds of historical processes Ringer wants to talk about, since the notionis defined by the presence of the right kinds of physical causal connectionsin a series. For Salmon, a genuine causal process is a series of connectedcausal states, a pseudoproccss, in which there is no connection other thanthose of spatial coincidence. The idea that the process consists of somethingmore than the series of connections, that it has some sort of life of its own,such as the historical tendencies of Marxism do, is not only unsupportedby Salmon, but inconsistent with his strategy, which is to define "process"exhaustively—that is to say with no remainder, by facts about the connec-tions. So the only idea of process one gets from Salmon is process as aseries of causal connections, and this seems also to be Weber's point: thatthere is nothing to tendencies other than the singular causal facts that makethem up.

Yet as I have noted, Ringer also attempts to make sense of the ideaof process through the notion of a train of events. But this notion is ournotion, a perspectival notion, not a feature of the world, as is evident fromthe examples in the quotations Ringer himself provides. The series of physi-cal events that leads to a plane crash when, for example, a maintenanceworker fails to secure a hatch, is, from the point of view of physical theory,not only normal but determined. The usual uses of the notion of a trainof events are in the law, where identifying the person or act responsiblefor an outcome: the worker, who failed to do something, is responsiblehere rather than the pilot, who did what he could, because the "normal,""expected," and so forth series of events was interfered with by the failureof the worker to do his job.

"Train of events" thinking about causality treats the relevant priorevents as an unspecified and unspecifiable totality which is, or is equivalentin its effects, to the normal or the expected causa! background againstwhich an omission can be identified. Weber specifically uses this legal no-tion, the notion of an omission as a cause, and says that it is appropriatefor the sociologist as well. The "expectations," of course, are ours as airtravelers; "normalcy" is from our perspective. So this doesn't help either.Worse, it is inconsistent with the notion of process in Salmon, in whichomissions cannot be causes, since by definition they involve no force to beconserved, no spatiotemporal continuity (and indeed might consist in thelack of spatiotemporal continuity), and so forth.

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So what has Ringer said about processes? Nothing, other than to opinethat Weber "accepted" them. We are not told what they are, how Salmon'sobjective physical science criteria and the notion of train of events (withits closely linked notion that omissions are causes) can be reconciled, orwhat there is to a "process" beyond the singular causal events that composeit, if anything. As I have noted, even Ringer can't ignore Weber's relentlessattack on, as Ringer himself puts its, the "error" made by historians whoequate "their own constructs with the 'essence' of the historically given, asif real phenomena could be 'deduced' from these constructs." But hedoesn't see that this means that for Weber "process" can at best be a meta-phorical notion, with no power of determination or causal force beyondthat which is contained in the individual causal links that make it up. Andthis means that the concept cannot have the central role that Ringer wantsto give it. So here, as with "immediate experience," Ringer has plucked aterm out of the writings of Weber and made a great deal of it, withoutmaking a coherent point. What appears to be a novel thesis about Weberianexplanatory structure turns out to be no more than another muddle inwhich inconsistent theses are presented and never reconciled.

WEBER'S RELATIVISM

Weber was able to concede that the part of causality that could beseen through the window of meaningfulness was quite definitely not thewhole of causality nor even the whole of causality relevant to the explana-tion of human action. Weber gives us a very powerful reason to believethat it could not be. His striking metaphor is visual. The light of the greatcultural concerns moves on, and we find ourselves losing the way in thedarkness. For Weber the questions we ask about human conduct throughthe window of the meaningful are quite narrow questions, and the windowthrough which we look at different times in history is very different. Thecultural and temporal conditions of understanding that obtained through-out the history of human kind and made one little fragment of the causalworld meaningful at one time or another is an enormously large array, butwhat can be seen in any given epoch is only a very narrow range of thisarray. There is no integrated, final image to be obtained. Even in a par-ticular moment in history the various disciplines of the social sciences, origi-nat ing in different practical impulses and refined in different waysnecessarily illuminate quite different spaces in the vastness of the causalworld, places that in the long view, the view of the whole of cultural ex-perience, are very tiny and quite possibly so different that little can beshared between them. This, in any case, is the standard view.


Ringer has a quite different view. Weber, he insists, was not a relativist,and was greatly concerned with objectivity in a transcultural sense. He in-troduces his discussions of the subject with the comment that what Weberwrote on "objectivity" and "value-neutrality" "is all too often misconstrued,and yet his formulations are not elusive" (1997: 122). He quotes in part,omitting the reference to culture, the passage on losing the path in thedark, and says that it is "often cited and sometimes overinterpreted" (1997:123). His interpretation is that Weber simply "accepted and even valuedthe energizing impact of contemporary concerns upon the cultural and so-cial sciences" (1997: 123-124). He adds shortly that "it would be an errorto see Weber as a cultural relativist" (1997: 125).

The term relativist is a tricky one, in that one can be a relativist aboutsome things, such as values, and not about others, such as about mathe-matics. And one can mean quite different things by the term. What couldWeber have meant when he says such things as "the highest ideals, whichmove us most forcefully, are always formed only in struggle with other ide-als which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us" (1949: 57), or "itis really a question not only of alternative between values but of an irrec-oncilable death struggle, like that between 'God' and the 'Devil'" (1949:17) and similar things. Usually people have thought that all this meant thatWeber was a value relativist in the sense that he believed that one consis-tent value choice or "ultimate value" was rationally as good as the next,that there thus is no way to settle value disputes over ultimate values, andthat many of the questions people talk about as though they can be settledrationally, such as the question of the relative value of French and Germanculture, or Mormon and Indian culture, cannot be settled rationally. Be-cause Weber explicitly connects not only culture to values but regards one'scommonsense outlook as a worldview, it is natural to conclude that Weberwas a cultural relativist in some uncontroversial sense of this term.

Ringer announces, however, that "Weber was in no sense a 'subjectivist'or a 'relativist.' " (1997: 141, my emphasis). A sample of the argumentationgiven in support of these claims follows: All Weber means by his pro-nouncements on the viewpoints and knowledge in social science, Ringerassures us, is that the results of social science research vary in "the degreeto which they interest some people and not others" (1997: 126). One mayobserve that this is of course also true for research in solid state physics,hydrogeological, benthic ecology, and the rest of science, and there it goeswithout saying. But in social science, Ringer must presume, there were peo-ple who didn't grasp this, and needed to be subjected by Weber to lengthypolemics (constructed over years and at great personal sacrifice) on thesubject. This is too absurd to continue to discuss. But the argument thatRinger ultimately gives to support the claim that Weber was not a cultural

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relativist does bear discussion, because it produces the same kind of muddlethat his discussion of causality did.

Weber's comments on what is universal are very modest and difficultto make out, and there is room for different interpretations. But we shouldat least be clear about what he said. The most puzzling passages relate toa hypothetical Chinese:

It has been and remains true that a systematically correct proof in the social sci-ences, if it is to achieve its purpose, must be acknowledged as correct even by aChinese. . . . Furthermore, the successful logical analysis of the content of anideal . . . must also be valid for a Chinese" (1949: 58).

It would be impossible to summarize the issues that these formulations raisehere. But this much is clear. Weber believes that a great deal is non-uni-versal. He insists that "All knowledge of cultural reality ... is alwaysknowledge from particular points of view" (1949: 81) and, speaking of thehistorical disciplines, that "at the very heart of their task lies not only thetransiency of ail ideal types but also at the same time the inevitability ofnew ones" (1949: 104). So the problem is to say what, if anything, fallsinto the categories "the norms of thought" or "logic" and is unchangingand what is in the category of ideal-typifications, and is transient.5

There is a large difference between the narrow notions of "systemati-cally correct proof" (which in any case has usually been thought to be im-possible in science, as distinct from mathematics) and "successful logicalanalysis" and "knowledge." The standard interpretation takes the differ-ence seriously and treats the hypothetical Chinese, who is Weber's stand-infor the impartial observer of other theories, to have narrow powers—tocheck the logic of the logical analysis, to calculate a dependent probability,and to check the application of purely classificatory concepts, as distinctfrom richer ideal-types. If these modest features of human thought are whatis "universal" and if everything else, that is to say that which Weber callsmeaningful, is non-universal and very likely non-intelligible to those withdifferent meaning schemes, then there is very little that is salvaged fromrelativity.

One form of the problem of drawing the line between supposedly uni-versal features of human thought and non-universal features is nicely illus-trated by Weber's discussion, but it must be said that there is more thanone problem of universality and that there is no clear and simple relationbetween the problems. Ringer claims, in the very next paragraph after alengthy quotation on this topic, that Weber believed "in the possibility ofinterpretation across cultural differences" and seems to think that thismeans that he was therefore not a relativist (1997: 126). This is not a slip.He later makes a great deal of issues raised in Rationality and Relativism,6which was indeed focused on this question.


The literature Ringer revives concerns a long dormant topic—dormant.as we shall see, for good reasons. He takes up sonic ideas proposed bySteven Lukes, which he calls "the new theory" and "the case against rela-tivism," (1997: 147). These turn out to be the idea that there needs to besome sort of base, a "bridgehead." of common beliefs in order for us totranslate, and that we cannot make sense of error unless we have a base ofagreement. Ringer tells us that "obviously, this formulation is largely iden-tical with Weber's account of interpretation on the initial assumption of'right rationality'" (1997: 147), and particularly the idea that "there must hea single analytical framework in which the investigator can move from therational interpretation to the (causal) explanation of beliefs" (1997: 148).

It is true that in the "rationality and relativism" discussions of the timethe idea of a bridgehead was advanced, and that proposals were madeabout what the bridgehead had to consist of. The deep problem that be-came apparent immediately in these discussions was that it was on the onehand impossible to separate claims about what was or was not necessaryto attribute to other cultures in order to interpret them from what was ac-tually a pan of those cultures. It was argued at the time, for example, thatmodus ponens, the rule by which conclusions are detached from the prem-ises of arguments, had to be universal. But the "had to" in question vac-illated between "had to" in a sense that if it was not universal we wouldbe unable to make intelligible those cultures that did not share it and theempirical-sounding claim that every culture possessed modus ponens in thefirst place.

This entire discussion was transformed by Donald Davidson, whose1974 paper7 attacked the "very idea" of a "conceptual scheme" on whichthis way of formulating the problem— which was Weber's way as well-rested.Its implications were not fully taken on board by the participants in thelecture series, but it has subsequently become a classic. His point was sub-tle, but far reaching. We can make sense of others only by translating theirviews into our own locutions, typically adding, in order to make their lo-cutions intelligible, some explanation of why they believed things we didnot believe. To explain Newtonian physics in Einsteinian terms, for example,we need to be able to say what differences exist between key concepts usedin each account and to make the former fully intelligible to an adherentof the latter. Ordinarily this means that we must explain why in the latterframework the adherence of the former framework wrongly believed whatthey did. Faced with a case in which we simply could make no headway inunderstanding a "culture," we are unable to say that they have a languageor conceptual scheme at all. So there can never be a case in which weestablish that another culture has a language which is unintelligible to us,not because this is not an empirical possibly but because it a conceptual

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one. To know enough to attribute a language and conceptual scheme isalready to have made sense of it to some significant extent.

Davidson then goes on to argue that we cannot make sense of it with-out starting with the premise that their beliefs are for the most part thesame as ours, that they live in the same world, believe the same thingsabout the objects that they differentiate in the world, and so forth. If thisweren't the case, we simply couldn't make sense of what they are sayingat all. If we believe that ail of their beliefs or a great many of their beliefsarc false, and that almost none of them are true, our understanding wouldconsist almost entirely of explanations of how they managed to believethese false things. But explaining error presupposes that error can be con-trasted to non-error, and if there is not a great deal of non-error therecannot be enough material to account for the errors. We are compelled bythis to practice, as Davidson put it, interpretive charity, i.e., assuming thatmost of what they say makes sense, if we are to interpret at all.

Although this is a difficult point to grasp, it becomes obvious on re-flection. If the people we are attempting to understand do not for examplebelieve that the sun is something that stands in a particular daily relation-ship to us, that it "sets in the west and rises in the cast," we cannot makesense of their error in failing to understand that the visual effect of risingand setting is a result of the motion of the sun rather than the motion ofthe earth. We would simply be unable to understand what they were talkingabout all. And if we guessed that they were using some term about thesun but spoke of it as though it were, for example, intermittent flashes oflightening, because they held weird beliefs such as that the sun does notshine except in brief flashes, we would be unable to say whether they weretalking about the sun, or lightning, or any of thousands of other phenomenathat are intermittent or periodic.

Davidson's (good Quinean) point is that what we do necessarily whenwe interpret another culture is interpret it in the light of a large range ofour own beliefs, and there is no point in singling out some subset of thesebeliefs (or for that matter inferential practices, such as modus ponens) asuniquely universal. Thus Davidson rejects the line-drawing problem, thesingle bridgehead image, and the whole lot. Very likely there are such be-liefs of ours that we may always be able to find correctly and unproble-maticaUy formulated in the cultures that we study. Every culturepresumably says something similar about sunrise and sunset But there isno principle that appears to be relevant to the distinction between thingsthat happen to be similar and those that do not. Terms like star and sun,for example, have modestly different senses attached to them in Europeanlanguages but by the time one gets to exotic primitive tribes, these usesand meanings may be made very quite dramatically. In these cases, we are

A Weber for the Right-Thinking 27!

in a position to made sense of these uses only because we can identify theterms as corresponding to ours in the expression of a great many noncon-troversial beliefs such as the sun rises and sets. But there is simply no rea-son to th ink tha t any given belief is or must be universal. Nor doesinterpretation require that there be.

The problem of relativism, however, derives from a somewhat differentsource. Anti-relativists would like to be able to say that there arc beliefsand modes of reasoning that are not specific to particular cultures, but arein some sense universally valid if not universally accepted, which can beused to pronounce upon the "rationality" of other cultures or of the beliefsof other cultures. Attempts to identify these universally valid beliefs havetypically proceeded in an a priori way by identifying those elements of ra-tionality without which human cultural life would be inconceivable.

The yield of these efforts has been meager and the meagerness haspointed to a basic dilemma in this strategy. If the beliefs and principles ofreason that are considered to be universally valid constitute a very shortand minima! list corresponding to what we can reasonably hope to attributeto "all genuine cultures," the contents of the list will be insufficient formaking these kinds of judgements of the rationality of the beliefs of othercultures. The question of the value of modern scientific culture and its su-periority over the culture of primitive faith is quite straightforwardly a valuequestion that even reasonable people in the present day may differ withrespect to and which in any case can only be answered by making the fun-damentally unjustifiable value choice for the scientific world view of thepresent that the anti-relativist supposes can and should be made.

If all that is universal is modus ponens, for example, we have no basisfor judging the rationality of anybody or anything, because, after all, wehad to attribute modus ponens to them in order to interpret the beliefs inquestion as meaningful beliefs. If the list is enriched to include such thingsas the beliefs about the external world that G. E. Moore once claimed tobe basic—beliefs like no one has ever been to the moon and I have twohands—one runs into puzzles, such as people who believe that God liveson the moon, as well as the problem that pronouncing on the error orirrationality of these views amounts to little more than saying things like"if these people meant literally that God lives on the moon, they arewrong"—claims that are difficult to distinguish from such much more ob-viously problematic assertions as "anyone who believes in God is irrationaland wrong."

On the question of the possibility of these kinds of judgments Weber'sarguments are abstract but unambiguous in their intent. The possessor ofa world view in which God lives on the moon must be taken to have aworld view that we could no longer possibly share, but which at the same

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time we are in no position to judge the value of. We can't share them, notbecause they are wrong, but because we can't re-enchant the world. Butour inability to re-enchant the world is our inability. It is precisely becauseWeber sees the judgments that the usual anti-relativist is eager to make asbeing fundamentally valuative that he sees them as fundamentally unjusti-fiable. This certainly is relativism of a sort, and it is a relativism that hasstood the test of time.

So here as in the discussion of causality, Ringer has imported contem-porary—or at least 1980s—material that confuses rather than clarifies.Does Weber believe that there is some core of universal rationality? A largeenough core to avoid the charge of relativism? Does he believe, againstDavidson, that there is one single supra-cultural analytical framework forinterpretation? These are bad questions. The best answer is that the prob-lems simply don't arise in Weber. He might have thought that there is somecommon core of logic and calculative powers, and perhaps more—such asthe ability to classify, that everyone, including the hypothetical Chinese,possesses. But this is entirely consistent with his being radically relativisticabout everything else, and for thinking that everything else, because it isvalue tainted, is relative. So how does Ringer arrive at the conclusion thatWeber is in no sense of the term a "relativist"? Perhaps he imagines thatit is through such questions as the conditions of the interpretation of othercultures. But Ringer's claims about Weber's response to these questionsare clearly wrong.

On the question of whether, as Ringer says, "there must be a singleanalytical framework," in the sense of Lukes, through which other culturesmust be analyzed or made sense of, Weber's answer is clearly no.8 In prin-ciple, Weber never exempted even the ideal-type of rationality from thejudgments that all ideal-types are transient. In practice, matters may bedifferent: we may never be faced with the problem of replacing this ideal-type just as we may never be faced with a culture whose utterances "thesun rises in the east" cannot be more or less unambiguously translated intoours and given the same truth values. One might draw an analogy herebetween Weber and Davidson. No particular belief is necessarily part ofthe "bridgehead" we construct when we translate the beliefs of anotherculture; no particular ideal-type is necessary to understanding the worldviews of others.

Does Weber claim that the contents of what is universal are sufficientlyrich to judge cultures? This presumably is what the unnamed "currentspokesmen for interpretation on the principle of 'rationality,' who are alsogenerally hostile to relativism" would say. Ringer insists that Weber's po-sition "anticipated" them (1997: 141). But clearly Weber makes no suchclaims. The ambiguously referred to "norms of [our] thought" appear only


once in Weber. He circumscribes the universal so carefully, and extendsthe range of the valuative so far, that there is no question that whatevercognitive judgments his hypothetical "Chinese" could make on the basis ofuniversal norms of thought would not extend to the kinds of questions thatanti-relativists wish to answer, such as "is human sacrifice always bad?" or"is theism irrational?" Does this make Weber in some sense a relativist?Yes. He is a value relativist, just in the sense that he has always beenthought to be, and one who thinks that the implications of value relativismgo very far beyond the narrow range of value or political choice, to includethe constitution of the objects of social science itself.

All Ringer does in this discussion is to muddy the water with a lineof argument, the bridgehead argument, that has little to do with Weber,and in any case has been discredited for almost two decades. If Ringerhad read Davidson's paper, one of the most important philosophical papersof the century, he could have spared us this entire discussion. Incredibly,he docs not even cite i t—he relies entirely on secondary literature.

CONFLICT-BLINDNESS AND RIGHT-THINKING

Ringer closes the book with a pious plea for intellectual rectitude andacademic civility. Nothing indicates that it is not sincere, or that he is notas genuinely right-thinking as he makes Weber out to be. Ringer avoidsthe slightest suggestion that the scholars who have previously interpretedWeber are guilty of malice, ideology, fashion-consciousness, and the like,though he sees all this as characteristic of the present. But one wonders ifperhaps he has fallen into the trap of thinking that to properly understandWeber it is really necessary only to read him from the point of view of aright-thinking, sensible person. There is considerable evidence in the textthat Ringer would have preferred that Weber expressed himself differently.But Weber was not a right-thinking, sensible author.

Field scientists talk about the ability to see objects, such as bone frag-ments, snail fossils, and the like, in the confused environment in whichmuch scientific searching in geology and paleontology takes place. Suchabilities are partly acquired, but their acquisition must rest on a base whichfew people share. Weber was cursed with an exceptional ability to see theconflicts and contradictions in the methodological writings and commentsof his contemporaries. He struggled with these conflicts and contradictions.He was able to raise so many of these conflicts, mostly with obscure, localadversaries, to such a high level of general significance that his writings onthem makes gripping reading even today. This is the source of his greatnessas a methodological writer, a greatness that is unique among social scien-

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tists. Ringer is cursed with an inability to see the same kind of conflicts,even in the interpretations he gives, and it is this blindness that gives hisbook its character.

ENDNOTES

1. Fritz Ringer, Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

2. Dirk Kasler, Max Weber. Eine Einfuhrung in Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Frankfurt. Cam-pus, 1995). Dirk Kasler. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work, trans, byPhilippa Hurd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

3. Wesley Salmon, "Causality Without Counterfactuals," Philosophy of Science 61, pp. 297-312 (1994).

4. Max Weber. Max, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans, by E. A. Shils and H.A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949); Economy and Society (New York: BedminsterPress, 1968): Gesammelte Aufsaatze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen. J. C. B. Mohr (PaulSiebeck), 1988).

5. Weber's reference to "die Normen unseres Denken" (1988: 184) Ringer translates as"the norms of thought," but is translated literally by Shils and Finch as "the norms ofour thought" (1949: 84). Neither translation conveys an unambiguous meaning, and theoriginal is no better. But Ringer puts the butcher's thumb on the scale.

6. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge, MA: TheMIT Press, 1982.

7. Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Proceedings and Ad-dresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974), reprinted in Donald Davidson,Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). This essay wasfirst presented as "Invariants of Translation," as a John Locke lecture in Trinity Term,1970, at Oxford. Most of what is contained in the essay was presented as two lectureson Alternative Conceptual Schemes at the University of London in January 1971. It wasgiven in its nearly final form as the presidential address to the Eastern Meeting of theAmerican Philosophical Association in December 1973. (1974: xi)

8. It should be added that Weber's view on primitive society and its interpretation are verydifferent from those who participated in the rationality and relativism dispute. Weberwas an extreme sceptic about the whole business of interpreting the doings of primitivesocieties in terms of the notion of rational action at all, and suggests that much of it is"understandable either only in biological terms or can be interpreted in terms of subjec-tive motives only in fragments" (1968: 17).


A Weber for the Right-Thinking

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