HUMANSTUDIES 1, I38-152 (1978)
The Process of Criticism in Interpretive Sociology and History STEPHEN P. TURNER AND DAVID R. CARR University of South Florida
A central theme of recent philosophy of science, developed most fully in the work of Karl Popper (1965), has been that one of the features distinguishing science from other sorts of intellectual activities is a process of critical revision. The classical variation on this theme is the thesis called "naive falsificationism" which holds that there is a line between sentences which are proper elements o f scientific discourse and those which are not. The "demarcation criterion" is falsifiability: sentences which are not open to objective test are beyond the line; those which are open to test are within. More subtle formulations of this theme have chosen classes of objects other than "sentences" - such as "theories" or "research programs" - to divide into scientific and nonscientific. Lakatos (1970), for example, wishes to deal with "research programs" taken as historical wholes and draw the line of demarcation between programs with a history of continuous theoretical growth and those "consisting of a mere patched up pattern o f trial and error" (p. 175). It may well be that the whole notion of constructing a demarcation criterion will prove as unrealizable as the Logical Positivists' program to construct a set of criteria of meaningfulness for scientific statements. But the legacy of Popperianism as a philosophical movement, when it is finally bequeathed, will surely include the recognition that it is crucial to an understanding of scientific discourse to understand the ways in which a scientific claim or theory is structured so as to be open to falsification, and therefore to criticism and revision, and the ways in which it may be structured so as to preclude particular classes of criticism. The efforts of "interpretive sociology" and efforts at "revisionist" or "'psychological" or "sociological" history have often been dismissed by mainstream sociologists and historians who have seen these efforts as lacking an adequate process of criticism and revision. In part, this misapprehension stems from inadequacies in the accounts that have been given of the character of interpretive Requests for reprints should be sent to Stephen P. Turner at Department of Sociology, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, Florida 33701.
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claims and the ground for these claims. What is needed is an account that would serve to show that the character of interpretive claims is such that there are appropriate criticisms and that there is a process of criticism and revision in which interpretive claims play a role. In what follows, an alternative account of interpretive claims involving attributions of intentions to agents will be formulated. The alternative elucidation of "interpretation" that will be explored here may be understood in terms of a distinction between the kinds of philosophical questions that we may ask about claims. In one part of the modem philosophic tradition, epistemologists have concerned themselves with questions of the "psychological basis" of the claim or of the causes that lead to belief in the claim. A philosopher like Descartes would attempt to answer a question like "what is knowledge" by looking at the sequence of events which produced "an idea" in the mind. The "physicalistic" terminus of this epistemological strategy was the "sense-data"theory of philosophers like Russell. The other terminus of this epistemological strategy was the phenomenology of Husserl, which looked at the whole matter from the standpoint of the mind and the experience that the mind has with the various objects of thought. This approach yields an account of interpretation as a mode of apprehension. It therefore treats intention or motive attributions as reports of apprehensions. The question of the character of this mode of apprehension, especially with respect to its similarities and dissimilarities to ordinary scientific observation, undeniably involves tremendous epistemological difficulties. However, these difficulties can be circumvented by dispensing with the idea that interpretations are reports of apprehensions. There is a parallel to the problem in John Austin's classic paper "Other Minds" (1970). Austin is commenting on the question "What is knowledge?" His approach is to ask questions about the context in which one may properly say, "I know X," and about the ways in which such a claim is challenged or justified. This leads to some startling results. When asked how we know there is a bittern in the garden, as his famous example goes, we give answers like "I was brought up in the fens," or "by its booming." Someone brought up on Descartes, the British empiricists, Phenomenology, or Logical Positivism would be led to expect that a knowledge claim refers to a current experience such as a direct observation or an internal sense of the clarity and distinctness of an idea. But instead of referring to a current experience, the first answer refers to past experiences, the second involves a claim o f a certain kind o f acumen which enables one to recognize bitterns, an acumen which was previously acquired. So an "I know X" sentence in ordinary speech turns out to imply a great deal more than philosophers following the "Cartesian" approach have been led to consider, and Austin's approach is to show these implications in common usage. The philosophical strategy followed here will resemble Austin's. As an example, we will consider the controversy over Weber's "Protestant Ethic" thesis: this thesis is one of the richest examples of the process of criticism to be found
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in all of academic literature. The example will be discussed with an eye toward providing an account of the use of evidence in deciding between alternative intentional attribution hypotheses. Such an account would be part of the "confirmation theory" for this class of interpretive claims. Since "confirmation theories" must be theories about the confirmation of specific kinds of explanatory claims, each is ordinarily coupled with an explanation theory, i.e., a theory of the logical structure of intentional explanations. There is already a voluminous literature on action explanations in Anglo-American philosophy, and we do not intend to add to it here. Suffice to say that the standard explanation theories embrace one of two alternatives - either the idea that reasons for action are causes of action, elaborated recently by such philosophers as Alasdair Maclntyre (1967) and Donald Davidson (1963) and historically by Hobbes, Hume, Locke, and Mill, or the idea that "reasons" explanations constitute a distinct, noncausal form of explanation, elaborated by Wittgenstein, in The Blue Book (1958), Anscombe (1958), Melden (1961), Winch (1958), and Peters (1960). The confirmation account to be presented here is designed to be suited to both construals of intention, at least with respect to the problem of deciding between competing intention.attributing hypotheses. A "causal" analysis of action explanations would modify this particular problem of confirmation theory to this extent: it would imply that it was at least conceivable for a hypothesis to be rejected as a causal explanation of a particular action of a particular individual on the grounds that the connection between the putative cause in the hypothesis and the action to be explained did not, in some other particular case, exhibit causal regularity. We will clarify the relevance of this to the issues of confirmation we will be directly concerned with here at the appropriate point below. WEBER AND HIS CRITICS Weber's essay on '~l'he Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" deals with a basic Weberian theme, the decline of "traditionalism" and the increasing "rationalization" of Western life. The particular sort of traditionalism that Weber is concerned with here concerns economic attitudes and ways of thinking. His object is to explain a basic shift in these attitudes, and he does this by showing what psychological effect certain Protestant doctrines had on believers. He identifies the problem by noting some statistical relationships between Protestantism and participation in the upper ranks of industrial and commercial enterprises and between the level of economic development of a region and its Protestantism. At first blush, the relation is a paradox. Early Protestantism was characterized not by worldliness or "the joy of living," but by other-worldliness, asceticism, and piety - in short, by attitudes hardly of the sort which we would think fit well with the drive for capitalistic acquisition. Weber attempts to resolve this paradox (and to account for these statistical relationships) by an analysis of the origins of this complex of drives, which he
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calls the "spirit of capitalism," in the doctrines and practical ethics of Protestantism. The connection, to be very short, amounts to this. The ideal-type ascetic Protestant believed each man was predestined either to have the grace of God or to be damned. This doctrine was the source of great anxiety, since each believer wished to know whether he was among the chosen (elect). Since Protestantism de-emphasized or eliminated the Roman Catholic sacraments, which Weber (1958) held to be "magical means of attaining the grace of God" (p. 105), other means of reassurance were sought. Pastors responded to these anxieties by saying that the individual should consider it a duty to believe himself to be among the chosen - doubts were evidence of imperfect grace. They then recommended "intense worldly activity" as a means to develop proper self-confidence. A variation on the older idea that "good works" assure salvation emerged. A believer looking for a "sign" that he was among the chosen was told to look at his life. To show yourself that you were among the chosen, your whole life would have to be a good work (godly). A life of disciplined devotion to a calling met this criterion nicely. Thus the believer's labor was invested with the highest psychological significance since the anxieties induced by the theological doctrines were alleviated by the success of his "good works." Indeed worldly success came to be recognized as evidence of God's favor. The believer was thus compelled to pursue worldly ends through industry, frugality, a systematization and "rationalization" of his conduct, and a suppression of desires for emotion, gratification, and pleasure. Weber's (1958) emphasis throughout is on the power of these doctrines as a "psychological sanction" and on the need for such a sanction in what he calls "that heroic age of capitalism" (p. 166). He remarks that: It is very easy not to recognize that only an unusually strong character could save an entrepreneur of this new type from the loss of his temperate self-control and from both moral and economic shipwreck. Furthermore, along with the clarity of vision and ability to act, it is only by virtue of very definite and highly developed ethical qualities that it has been possible for him to command the absolutely indispensable confidence of his customers and workmen. Nothing else could have given him the strength to overcome the innumerable obstacles, above all the infinitely more intensive work which is demanded of the modem entrepreneur. But these are ethical qualities of quite a different sort from those adapted to the traditionalism of the past. (p. 69) It was in overcoming the constraints of medieval economic moral conceptions that related to trade and the organization of labor that the "heroism" came in. This required men made of sterner moral stuff than was needed for later entrepreneurial activity. It was the psychological sanction of these religious doctrines that provided the inner strength essential to the breaking of the bonds of economic traditionalism. Capitalism, in the sense of large financial undertakings for the sake of gain and involving risk, is as old as history, and these activities have always required rational, self-disciplined conduct. Weber's point is that men who conducted their economic
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affairs in a rational and self-disciplined fashion had previously occurred only sporadically and in small numbers. The significance of Protestantism was that it systematically produced such men, and this fact in itself changed the possibilities of economic organization. Specifically, Weber thought the existence of large numbers of rational and self-disciplined persons made possible the capitalistic organization of labor, which he saw as a crucial condition for developing a fully capitalistic economic order (Weber, 1958, l - C ; 1961, p. 260, n 276). There has never been a state of settled opinion on Weber's thesis. As late as 1937, we find Parsons (1968) claiming that "the facts brought against it in the critical literature will not stand examination" (p. 576). However, this perception o f the scholarly status of the thesis was by no means universal. According to Ferguson (1963), controversy over the theories of Weber and Sombart lasted only "until the early '30s, by which time they had been largely discredited by the economic historians" (p. viii). Weber's critics have taken two principal lines of approach. One is to deny that the problem the Weber thesis attempts to resolve exists. Weber claimed to have identified a period of capitalism which was heroic in the sense that persons acted to defy circumstance and tradition, and he claimed they did so out of motivations or more precisely out of qualities of character that previously occurred individually but were not part of the culture. The existence of such a period can be questioned. The second line of approach questions the cultural interpretation, his attributions of particular qualities of character to the early Protestants. Henri Pirenne formulates one of the most influential examples of the first approach, arguing that "capitalism" as a form of activity flourished well before the reformation. Pirenne argued that medieval cities emerged when long-distance merchants settled in permanent locations, a phenomenon which he dates as far back as the eleventh century. He had evidence that these merchants were involved in substantial trading activities at this point. While one may hesitate to identify these early merchants as "capitalist," there was even then a class distinction between the merchants, who were "bourgeoisie," and the artisans residing in the towns. Pirenne (1956) does not hesitate to suggest that the economic actions o f such tenth century figures as St. Godric of Finchale, who began his career in commerce as a poor peddler and eventually joined as a partner in higtfly profitable coastal trade, were animated by the spirit of capitalism: Scant as they are, medieval sources place the existence of capitalism in the twelfth century beyond a doubt. From that time long-distance trade unquestionably produced considerable fortunes. The case of Godrie has already been quoted. The spirit which animated him was in every sense of the term the capitalistic spirit of all times. He reasoned, he calculated and his sole aim was the accumulation of profits. (p. 161) (See also Pirenne, 1970, pp. 116-119.)Similar pre-Reformation "capitalistic" mentalities are found by other writers.
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Such evidence is presented to undermine the claim that there is a great discontinuity in the intentional character of economic action at the chronological points Weber identifies. It is designed to suggest that the spread of "capitalist" practices of calculation, capital accumulation (and eo ipso "deferred gratification"), and choice - which Weber must claim are discontinuities - were a consequence of the increased opportunities for "capitalistic" conduct which occur with the accumulation of capital in the hands of private persons. The more capital, the more opportunities for economic action involving calculation and accumulation, since more kinds of things can be bought and sold (labor, land, basic commodities) on the market if there is money to invest in them. Weber's writings (1958, p. 22; 1961, pp. 128-132, n 276)emphasize the importance of capitalistic organization of labor, and this fact of economic life is understood in a particular way by writers like Pirenne who stress the continuity of capitalist enterprise. Notice that if investment in enterprises involving free labor were not profitable, it would have been capitalistically irrational to hire free laborers. The political conditions in northern Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire, specifically the fragmentation of political authority characteristic of feudalism and the emergence of manorialism, were such that the first opportunities to accumulate capital were in the sphere of trade between political units, i.e., foreign trade rather than trade within domestic units. At the earliest times, a rationalcapitalistic strategy would have invested in foreign trade and not in, for example, manors or textile manufactories, for which no substantial return was possible since suitable markets did not exist. As capital accumulates, however, and competition increases, leading to falling rates of profit, it becomes rational to invest in such less profitable activities. Presumably, at each step in the development of a more fully capitalized economy, success - indeed survival - of enterprises depends upon the traits of character Weber associates with post-Reformation capitalists. Pirenne argued that these enterprises involved a division of labor, requiring a degree of what Weber (1961) calls "business honor" (p. 269) almost from the beginning of the revival of trade, i.e., from the point at which capital accumulation made a division of labor feasible, and capitalist competition made it necessary. He also insists that these capitalists were not isolated cases, but that they formed a numerous and conspicuous class, and had done so very early, long before Weber thought it could have been profitable to organize free labor capitalistically (cf. Weber, 1961, p. 129) and long before the Reformation. The second line of criticism involves Weber's account of the Protestant character and Protestant doctrine. Knappen (1963) argues that the teaching that good works (in the distinctive Protestant sense) were necessary to gain the assurance of salvation, on which Weber lays so much emphasis, "was only one small point in a maze of doctrines, and the facts of everyday Puritan existence strongly suggest that in reality the average Reformed churchman, like Calvin himself,
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worried very little about securing this assurance" (p. 348). (See also Rogers & Ward, 1933, pp. 10-16.) The Puritans were not, in Knappen's view, motivated by the profound anxiety Weber attributes to them. Knappen's own evidence is drawn from the intense self-examinations o f spiritual progress found in the diaries of Tudor Protestants. Christopher Hill (1961), the noted Marxist historian, emphasizes that doetrines on callings were peripheral to the main thrust of Protestant theology. He suggests that the main thrust, insofar as practical morality is concerned, is the idea that an activity is good or bad according to the spirit in which it is done. "In your heart you know it's right" is a characteristically Protestant moral notion. Today, this makes Protestantism more flexible in the face of moral issues like abortion. In earlier times, this flexibility helped trade, for the merchant who felt in his heart that what he was doing in commerce was morally right received theological sanction for acting on the feeling. The Protestant merchant was therefore self-assured in his actions, not driven by anxiety, as the Weber thesis would have it. THE CHARACTER OF THE CLAIMS To understand what sort of claims these criticisms are and the way they bear on Weber's interpretation we may first consider what they are not. They are not claims that Weber's imputations of intention are inconceivable, unintelligible, or in any sense psychologically impossible. This can be seen if we compare them to a particularly striking example of such a claim drawn from the context o f literary criticism. Edith Wharton's biographer remarks that "she struggled for years against what she regarded as the exaggerated claims made for James Joyce's Ulysses - retaining a peculiarly skeptical eye about the psychological authenticity of Molly Bloom's long concluding erotic monologue" (Lewis, 1975, p. 8). Ms. Wharton might have said that the monologue "didn't ring true," and gone on to describe the features that made for the "'dissonance" (in such a way that the reader would sense them). She might then have said, "No woman would attach erotic feelings to those things." So Ms. Wharton's view amounts to a negative claim about the emotional capacities of persons in a category. It relies on the existence of what we might conceive o f as limits to the capacities, and therefore the possibilities, of the intentions that might be formed by members o f the category. Locutions like "doesn't ring true" are not found in the criticisms o f Weber. One might take an issue over whether or not Weber's ideal-type does "ring true" psychologically. If one could show that it does not, one could exclude it from the list of possible interpretations, and be left with the task of deciding between the remaining possibilities. In some cases of action, one could perhaps exclude a great many possibilities on such grounds, but there will always be a great many
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possibilities left. The interpretations of both Weber and his critics seem to meet the standard of psychological conceivability, at least with respect to the historical evidence of belief and conduct each analyst uses to substantiate his interpretations. A different view of these claims was mentioned above when it was suggested that if we follow Cartesian strategy in accounting for intention-attributions we are led to view our knowledge of intentions as "apprehended" in some fashion, and therefore would regard claims about intentions such as those made by Weber and by his critics as reports of apprehensions. The special character of reports of "apprehensions," whether they are apprehensions of the position of the morning sun or apprehensions of religious truths, is that they can be erroneous in only two ways. They can be wrong because of a failure in the execution of the mode of apprehension or through a mistake in reporting what has been successfully apprehended. In a case of the latter sort one changes one's method of reporting to correct the mistake. One might learn that one has systematically misdescribed the falling away of the horizon in the morning as "the sun rising." The former kind of error involves a mistake in the application of a technique or procedure. For example, in theology one cannot rely on one's moral apprehensions if one is not in a state of grace. In biology one cannot observe the Brownian motion unless the microscope is set up properly. If it is not, one's apprehension of what is on the slide cannot tell you that it is or is not there. These two types of failures are the only failures that disqualify a report of an "apprehension." If the horizon fails to fall away some future morning, this will occasion the overthrow of the laws of physics, but it will not bear on the validity of previous observations. If another person apprehends a different moral truth than you do, it does not bear on the validity of your apprehension. It is signifi. cant that the critics of Weber discussed here do not claim either that Weber has failed in his execution of a mode of apprehension or that he has misreported an apprehension. Their disagreement with Weber depends on their introduction of facts which are separate from those Weber takes as the basis for his intention interpretations, but which they claim bear on the intentions in question. Such claims do not fit the "apprehension" conception. An "apprehension" must be an apprehension of a distinct fact or set of facts. Facts which are separate from this set of facts cannot be said to disqualify the apprehension itself. So a new conception or analysis of the confirmatory aspects of these claims is necessary. The basic notion of what follows is that the confirming grounds for interpretive explanations of action are closely analogous to the grounds for accepting or rejecting translations of sentences between languages. Consider some of the commonalities. The terms "mean" and "intend" are often used interchangeably. A person is said to "mean well" or be "well intentioned." Similarly, we ask what a person means by doing something, just as we ask what a person means by something he says and we ask what he intends by doing something. Similar commonalities occur with the words "translate" and "explain." Consider two
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statements about the difficulties of diplomats in explaining Watergate developments. This one was taken from a national news magazine: "One of the biggest problems we have," sighed a European diplomat, "is trying to translate the internal politics of one country into the language of another. It's almost impossible to explain the intricacies of what is happening here." An alternative which transposes the two terms: "One of the biggest problems we have," sighed a European diplomat, "Is trying to explain the internal politics of one country into the language of another. It's almost impossible to translate the intricacies of what is happening here." reads just as naturaUy, and the rephrasing does not alter the meaning. The kinship between the concepts of explanation and translation, then, is sometimes close. If we were to substitute the term "interpretation" for either "explanation" or "translation" in these quotations, the meaning o f the passages would not change much. The adequacy of a translation consists in this, roughly speaking: an adequate translation of a sentence in language X yields a sentence in language Y which has the same implications. When we dispute the translation of a sentence, we may show that it has an implication in one language that it does not in the other. There is a characteristic process of criticism: We start with a problem of the form W~rhere they say 'X' what do we say?" and hypothesize a rule like "Where they say 'X,' we say 'Y.'" This rule formulates an analogy between the use of X in the one language and the use of Y in the other. We may discover that the hypothesized rule leads us astray on certain occasions o f the use of X: we draw wrong conclusions, or cannot make ourselves understood. These breakdowns give us a puzzle of the form, "Why did the rule work (or appear to work) on this occasion and not on that one?" At this point, we look at the "context." We are looking for something specific: material, like conduct, expressions used in connection with X, and so forth, with which to construct analogies between the "game" or set of usages, of which the expression is a part, and such sets in our own language. Our goal will be to f'md a rule, or an analogy, that would not break down, as our first hypothesized rule did. For example, if a claim that "Where we say 'X," they say ' Y " ' is made where X is hypothesized to be "'The cat is on the mat" and a counter claim is made to the effect that X should be ' T n e dog is on the mat," we can decide between the two by looking for dogs or cats when Y is uttered. "The cat is on the m a t " implies that the cat is on the mat. I f another translator claimed that Y was a curse uttered at cats on mats, its use would also imply that the cat is on the mat. To decide between translating it as a curse or as a statement, we must look at other aspects of Y's use: whether, for example, to utter it is taboo under certain circumstances, and its utterance would cause consternation or elicit remonstrances not to say it in front of guests. This would show that, in addition to implying that the cat is on the mat, it implied blasphemy. Whether some fact of context is
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relevant to the translation depends on whether either of the alternative translations imply anything about the fact. Thus, "the context" is not a fixed unit; its scope varies with the dispute. The key to the analogy between "intention" discourse and "translation" discourse is the fact that disputes ordinarily involve conflicting claims about the relevance of particular facts as well as those about the relation between evidence and claims. The centrality of problems of relevance can be seen in connection with a simple example o f alternative intention hypotheses. The Dean of a college promulgates new guidelines governing promotion and tenure decisions. These rules do not, on the surface at least, change the informal practices already followed in evaluations. They do not give criteria for decisions. They only specify what facts are to be considered by departments in evaluating candidates. A good deal of speculative gossip results from this action of the Dean. Interpretation A is that the Dean is out to "get" certain faculty members who are involved in unionization activities, and has offered the guidelines in an attempt to improve his position. Interpretation B is that he is doing favors for certain departments and programs and that the guidelines are to the advantage of these programs. Interpretation C is that he is afraid of lawsuits or HEW examinations over tenure and promotion decisions and wishes to be able to protect himself in court in case decisions are challenged. Interpretation D is that he has a "managerial mentality" and therefore cannot bear to have a pluralistic, nonstandardized set of decision-making criteria. The evidence that would be appropriate to deciding between these interpretations would be extraordinarily diverse. In considering A, one would ask for evidence that the Dean is antiunion. If he had given covert aid to the union in the past, one would need evidence that he had changed his mind. One would also need evidence that the Dean believed that these faculty members would be hurt by the guidelines. Each o f these auxiliary hypotheses, which are implications of the intention hypothesis, has its own auxiliary hypotheses, or implications. The Dean would, for example, have to know that the faculty members were involved with the union. Often these hypotheses are accepted prima facie, and discarded when they are shown to have false implications. In considering B, one would ask whether the Dean believed that certain departments would benefit by the rule and whether these were indeed favored. Did he know at the time that these policies were formulated that these favored departments would be benefited? Has he tried to benefit these departments before, or does he have some reason to benefit these departments and not others? Attributions of intentions involving ends which are not immediately apparent often raise issues which require auxiliary hypotheses about what we ordinarily call "motives." Why would he want the end that the reason points to? The answers to these questions are usually general ones like glory, recognition, and wealth. We dispute these by showing that the person does not usually act out of these motives: "The Dean always says he just wants to get back to his laboratory."
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Notice that in cases where the Dean has expressed specific intentions, or motives, we must assess the sincerity of these expressions. These assessments may involve the Dean's general truthfulness, sincerity, changeability, and so forth. These questions arise secondarily to hypotheses o f intention, when they do arise, and they involve an even broader range of implications. An example is Interpretation C. It attributes a specific intention to the act, but this attribution is concealed. It shows up in the fact that one could reject it by saying "the Dean knows that HEW wouldn't consider procedures like these in a hearing." Since this claim would be false - the discretion of hearing examiners is wide, and the Dean would know that the more evidence on procedures he had, the better - the intention itself is not really problematic. What is problematic is showing that the Dean is really in fear of lawsuits and hearings of this sort. This requires showing that in other contexts where the Dean believes there is a risk o f lawsuits, he acts cautiously. Interpretation O is in some ways the most interesting. To say that the Dean has a "managerial mentality" is to say something about the standards or criteria that guide his actions. These are "ultimate values" - ultimate in the sense that there is nothing that justifies or specifies them. These sometimes are at issue for the sociologist, but by no means always. These explanations tum out to fit the "translation" model especially well. We explain the Dean's application o f "managerial" standards here by saying "the Dean would describe the absence of written specifications of what material is relevant to personnel decisions as 'impossibly chaotic' just as a professor would describe a term paper that used five different ways to identify references as impossibly chaotic. He would say 'there are certain standards of form' just as the professor would. And he would feel repelled by the 'chaos' just as the professor would. He might, as the professor might, try to give some justification for the standards of form, but these would, as the professor's would, be only ad hoc." One could expand this sort of explanation to deal with whatever "'managerial" standards came to be at issue. The explanation shows the analogy between the professor's usage and the Dean's, and shows the disanalogies as well, just as a good translation does. These are all implications of the interpretations, then, just as the cat being on the mat is an implication of the translation. These very brief suggestions put us in a position to make some more general points. The criticisms of Weber described above fit this pattern rather than any pattern of challenging the evidence Weber examines or the link between Weber's evidence and his interpretive conclusions. The critics introduce evidence drawn from outside the set of evidence employed by Weber. So they do not treat Weber's claims as a report of an "apprehension." Pirenne's argument resembles showing that the Dean acted for reasons other than to benefit certain departments by showing that he had formed his intention prior to learning what departments would benefit by his action. Pirenne's case is that many persons conducted them. selves in capitalistic ways without having done so out o f Protestant religious me-
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tives. He shows they did not do so out of Protestant motives by selecting cases from periods long prior to the Reformation. The person he identifies must have acted out of the "temperate self-contror' that Weber claims was necessary to keep them from "moral and emotional shipwreck" since they were able to act on their national calculations with considerable success, and they succeeded in this way in common with many other entrepreneurs. So the intentions that medieval entrepreneurs formed and acted on could not have been based on Reformation religious motives and the actions of their post-Reformation successors need not have been based on them. Knappen's argument that nothing in the daily lives of the Puritans indicatcd that they felt much more anxiety about salvation than Calvin himself also fits. In our ordinary discourse we say things like "if George had really loved her, he would never have spoken so casually of the incident," "if pomo movies really bored him, he wouldn't keep going back for more," and "if the Dean had been afraid of lawsuits he wouldn't have acted so incautiously." These acts and claims are evidence for and against particular imputations or motives or emotional states. If we attribute some general motive such as anxiety to a person, we must show its manifestations in other actions than the ones we are explaining. Knappen says that these manifestations of anxiety cannot be found. They acted - wrote in their diaries, preached, and so forth - as though they were as sure as Calvin himself about their salvation. Hill's remarks about the centra~ty for Protestantism might appeal to merchants as a justification for the actions they would have performed anyway in response to the economic opportunities that presented themselves after the Reformation. These pieces of counterevidence are relevant because they are contrary to the implications of Weber's intention-attributions or support altemative intention. attributions. The attributions are disputed by showing that the actions which were implied by the attribution hypothesis were different from the actions that were performed, or by showing that the agent did not possess the reasons or wants attributed to him. The phrase "implications of intention-attributions" takes us to the heart of the problem of "reasons" and "causes." The key notion of the "causal" analysis of "reasons" explanations is that when one explains a person's action by citing a reason, as in "Bill rose because he heard the national anthem," one is describing the cause or part of the cause of his action. In the Humean view of cause, particular causal explanations imply regularities, though formulated in concepts which are very close to the concepts in which Bill's action of standing during the national anthem at the ballpark is ordinarily described. If one analyzes "reasons" explanations in this way, one would say that an inference like "if George had really loved her, he would not have spoken so casually of the incident" rests on and is ultimately warranted by causal regularities that lie at a deeper level, and which would involve true generalizations holding between two classes of event or fact which correspond, in some way, to descriptions like "George loved her" and "George spoke casually of it." Thus the implications
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one would rely on in attributing an intention here are construed as implications of true generalizations, i.e., those which formulate the more fundamental causal regularities. The "causal" analysis of reasons explanations remains controversial. The principle alternative construal of"implications of intention-attributions" would treat these implications criteriologicaUy. Not speaking casually of the beloved would, in this view, be a criterion for the proper application of the phrase "George really loved her." In denying that George really loved her on the grounds of his speaking so casually, one would be denying that the phrase was properly used of George. "Properly used" means "intelligibly used," so in a sense when an intention-attribution is disconfirmed by a move like this, one shows the attribution to be "beyond the limits of conceivability" as these limits were discussed above in connection with Edith Wharton's reaction to Molly Bloom. However, one must be careful to note that the limits of intelligibility in the criteriological sense are known to the competent native speaker who has learned to use the term "love," so the criteria are "public" and there is no question about whether such and such an intention is conceivable to me and not to you. To use an example of Weber's, one's agreement with the intention-attribution "he did it because of his passion for chocolate" does not depend on whether one can conceive a passion for chocolate oneself. Under a "causal" construal of "reasons" explanations, the analogous "limits" would be such that attributions which were not ultimately warrantable, at least in principle, by underlying causal regularities would be "beyond the limits." The same objective to a particular intention-attribution may often be understood as evidence that there is no underlying causal regularity that could warrant the attribution or as criteriological evidence. If one claims that one's brother is penurious, and another counters this by producing an example of the brother's extravagance, the same example might be formulated criteriologically where the critic might conclude by remarking "and I don't call that 'penurious,"' or it might be formulated causally, where the critic might conclude by remarking that whatever was the real cause of the brother's apparent penuriousness in certain situations, he did not have an innately penurious disposition. In actual sociological discourse on intention-attributions, such as those of the Weber thesis, no decision between a "causal" and a "criteriological" analysis is necessary. The arguments that the sociologist must deploy against particular attributions are already an established part of ordinary discourse and are intelligible as such (cf. Heap, 1977, p. 182). The basic point that has been made here in connection with "phenomenological" conceptions of interpretation is that the analysis of the confirmation aspects of intention-attribution claims cannot be reduced to a matter of explicating the evidence-conclusion relation as a "mode of apprehension." But what is sauce for the phenomenological goose is also sauce for the behavioral gander. A closely related point is applicable to attempts to draw theoretical conclusions which
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involve "behavioral" data. Where intention-attributions are involved, the confirmation aspects of the claim cannot be reduced to the connection between a specified set of behavioral evidence and the conclusion. Two examples should make this clear. In the course of Abel's (1948) classic formulation of the positivistic theory of Verstehen he comments on a study of Lundberg's by remarking that: We do not accept the fact that farmers postpone intended marriages when faced with crop failure because we can "understand" the connection. It is acceptable to us because we have found through reliable statistical operations that the correlation between the rate of marriage and the rate of crop production is extremely high. (p. 217) The conclusion here is "the fact that famlers postpone intended marriages . . . . " The evidence is the statistical connection referred to in the second sentence. In Abel's conclusion, the notion of intention enters explicitly. It is concealed in the Coles' (1972) analyses of social stratification in science. They present evidence that certain scientists are cited more frequently than others in scientific journals, and use the statistical distributions of citations to warrant claims about the "quality" of the scientific work performed by scientists in various categories. The "validity" of this measure of quality is established by correlating citationcounts with such things as Nobel prize awards. It would certainly be relevant to point out, as Professor James McCartney did in 1974 in a discussion at the session in which the Society for Social Studies of Science was formed, that many citations are added to articles in the course of the author's revisions for the editor. The intention behind these citations is hardly the benign intention to recognize contributions to the author's thinking that is assumed by the Coles' when they identify citation-counts with quality. By the same token, it would be appropriate to criticize Abel's conclusion by pointing out that among the farmers he was studying it was the mother's prerogative to fix dates for marriages, and that therefore the farmers' intentions were irrelevant to postponements. The significance of both these criticisms is that they involve facts which are apart from the evidence-conclusion nexus that standard texts in Sociological Methodology are concerned to explicate and codify. The fact that both of them are relevant criticisms shows simply that this nexus does not exhaust the logic of confirmation for claims like the Coles' and the claim of Lundberg's that Abel cites. When such claims involve intention-attributions, either explicit or concealed, these attributions are open to criticisms of the sort elucidated here by the "translation" analogy. REFERENCES Abel, T. The operation called Verstehen. The American Journal o f Sociology, 1948, 54, 211-218. Anscombe, G. E. M. Intention. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. Austin, J. L. Philosophical papers. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.
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Cole, J. R., & Cole, S. The Ortega hypothesis. Science, 1972, 178, 368-375. Davidson, D. Actions, reasons and causes. Journal o f Philosophy, 1963, 60, 425-435. Ferguson, W. K. Introduction. In A. yon Martin, Sociology o f the Renaissance.New York: Harper, 1963. Heap, J. L. Verstehen, Language and warrants. Sociological Quarterly, 1977, 18, (Spring), 177-184. Hill, C. Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. In F. J. Fisher fed.), Essays in the economic and social history o f Tudor and Stuart England in honour erR. H. Tawney. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Knappen, M. M. Tudor puritanism: A chapter in the history of idealism. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963. Lakatos, I. Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programs. In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrave (Eds.), Criticism a~d the growth o f knowledge. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton. A biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. MacIntyre, A. The idea of a social science. Proceedings o f the Aristotelian Society, 1967, Supp. 41, 95-114. Melden, A. I. Free action. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Parsons, T. The structure ofsocialaction. New York: Free Press, 1968. Peters, R. S. The concept of motivation, 2nd ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. Pirenne, H. Economic and social history o f medieval Europe (I. E. Clegg, trans.). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956. Pirenne, H. Medieval cities (F. D. Hakey, trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Popper, K. R. Conjectures and refutations. New York: Harper, 1965. Rogers, R., & Ward, S. Two Elizabethan puritan diaries, M. M. Knappen fed.). Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1933. Weber, M. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Seribner's, 1958. Weber, M. General economic history. New York: Collier, 1961. Winch, P. The idea era social science and its relation to philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. Wittgenstein, L. The blue and brown books. New York: Harper, 1958.
