We now turn to a very different approach to social science and a very different notion of science.

This tradition of thinking is closer to the rationalist than the empiricist traditions in philosophy, and the starting point is that whether or not positivism is an adequate philosophy of the natural sciences, whatever its advantages or drawbacks, the social sciences are qualitatively different from the natural sciences.

We find the difference between the objects of the two types of science expressed in different ways. Perhaps the most obvious distinction is that the objects of the social sciences - human beings and human groups - possess a property that we know as self­consciousness. They are able to reflect on themselves and their situations and their relationships. Human life is essentially a life of meaning, of language and reflective thought and communication. Sociologists often refer to this as ‘reflexivity’ (Giddens 1984), and there are a number of very different approaches that are based on this human capacity for self-consciousness and reflection - but they all involve ways of interpreting the meanings that people give to their actions, and most are concerned with the nature of rationality. They ask questions about what exactly it is that we do when we understand human action. How do we know whether our understanding is adequate, and indeed what do we mean by adequate? What is the relationship between understanding and explanation? Can we understand action at all if it takes place in the context of another culture? These are clearly different concerns from those of the natural scientist, but they can be seen as related to the concerns of the philosophers and historians of the natural sciences as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4.

In this chapter we are concerned with a cluster of approaches which, for reasons that will become apparent, can brought together because of their concern with an instrumental notion of rationality. The end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth saw a shift in philosophical attention towards the nature of language and language use. The principal subject of this chapter - Max Weber - was less explicitly concerned with language, but he was profoundly concerned with meaning. After discussing Weber we will go on to look at related interpretive approaches which fall into the same broad category: phenomenological sociology, which provides a deeper philosophical underpinning for Weber’s categories; rational choice theory, which takes us closer to late nineteenth-century economics with which Weber was familiar; and approaches developed from American pragmatism.