Conclusion
This chapter has introduced the idea that the social sciences proceed in a way very different from that taken by the natural sciences, as a result of the differences between the objects studied by the social and natural sciences.
The crucial difference is that the objects of the social sciences, like the social scientists who study them, are conscious, reflexive beings who endow their actions with meaning. We have looked at four different philosophical approaches that we have grouped together under the label ‘instrumental rationality'. They have in common an assumption that the object of social science is the action of individual human beings aiming to achieve this worldly goal.Beyond this, there are significant differences between them. Rational choice theory, influential in economics and sociology, presents the simplest and most rigid view of rational action - a choice of what brings the greatest benefit to the actor. Weber, who has been appropriated mainly by sociologists, offers a much wider conception much closer to our common-sense notion of everyday rational action, and his conception of rationality is surrounded by the irrationality or partial irrationality of the other three types of social action: those based on tradition, on emotion and on the irrational choice of ultimate values.
Whereas rational choice theory and Weberian sociology tend to take meanings for granted, the phenomenological development of Weber and sociological and social psychological developments of pragmatism are more interested in the development or construction of meaning. For Schutz this development occurs through a process of typification from the stream of consciousness, and this leads neatly to Weber's idealtype methodology. For Mead and symbolic interactionism, on the other hand, the focus is on the collective negotiation of meaning in everyday contexts.
If we can talk about rationality at all it is a context-bound rationality, specific only to particular situations.How are we to make sense of the overall argument and the variations? It would be a strange social science which at no point took account of what human beings thought of themselves and how they thought about what they were doing. It does not follow, as many seem to suppose, that this is all that social scientists have to look at; positivist methods can perhaps help us understand some aspects of human social life, and we might also be able to talk about the effect of social structures of which social actors are not completely away or are unaware.
It is arguable as well that there is no need to choose between the different approaches discussed here - they can each be seen as appropriate to some level of analysis or particular object of meaningful social action. Weber's ideas are perhaps the most generally applicable in setting out the task of understanding and the criteria it must meet; Schutz offers us a way of studying the processes of consciousness and the taken- for-granted world; interactionism gives us a way of looking at the social generation of meaning; and rational choice theory is perhaps most appropriate for looking at certain economic decisions. It might be, however, that none of them can make sense of what I do when I fall in love.
And, of course, these are not the only ways of making sense of what we think and of our actions.