Individualism and Economic Order

III. The Facts of the Social Sciences1

1

THERE exists today no commonly accepted term to describe the group of disciplines with which we shall be concerned in this paper. The term “moral sciences,” in the sense in which John Stuart Mill used it, did approximately cover the field, but it has long been out of fashion and would now carry inappropriate connotations to most readers. While it is for that reason necessary to use the familiar “social sciences” in the title, I must begin by emphasizing that by no means all the disciplines concerned with the phenomena of social life present the particular problems we shall discuss. Vital statistics, for example, or the study of the spreading of contagious diseases, undoubtedly deal with social phenomena but raise none of the specific questions to be considered here. They are, if I may call them so, true natural sciences of society and differ in no important respect from the other natural sciences. But it is different with the study of language or the market, of law and most other human institutions. It is this group of disciplines which alone I propose to consider and for which I am compelled to use the somewhat misleading term “social sciences.”

Since I shall contend that the role of experience in these fields of knowledge is fundamentally different from that which it plays in the natural sciences, I had, perhaps, better explain that I myself originally approached my subject thoroughly imbued with a belief in the universal validity of the methods of the natural sciences. Not only was my first technical training largely scientific in the narrow sense of the word but also what little training I had in philosophy or scientific method was entirely in the school of Ernst Mach and later of the logical positivists. Yet all this had the effect only of creating an awareness, which became more and more definite as time went on, that, certainly in economics, all the people who are universally regarded as talking sense are constantly infringing the accepted canons of scientific method evolved from the practice of the natural sciences; that even the natural scientists, when they begin to discuss social phenomena, as a rule—at least in so far as they preserve any common sense—do the same; but that, in the not infrequent instances when a natural scientist seriously tries to apply his professional habits of thought to social problems, the result has almost invariably been disastrous—that is, of a sort which to all professional students of these fields seems utter nonsense. But, while it is easy to show the absurdity of most concrete attempts to make the social sciences “scientific,” it is much less easy to put up a convincing defense of our own methods, which, though satisfying to most people in particular applications, are, if looked at with a critical eye, suspiciously similar to what is popularly known as “medieval scholasticism.”

2

But enough of introduction. Let me plunge directly to the middle of my subject and ask with what kind of facts we have to deal in the social sciences. This question immediately raises another which is in many ways crucial for my problem: What do we mean when we speak of “a certain kind of facts”? Are they given to us as facts of a certain kind, or do we make them such by looking at them in a certain way? Of course all our knowledge of the external world is in a way derived from sense perception and therefore from our knowledge of physical facts. But does this mean that all our knowledge is of physical facts only? This depends on what we mean by “a kind of facts.”

An analogy from the physical sciences will make the position clear. All levers or pendulums which we can conceive have chemical and optical properties. But, when we talk about levers or pendulums, we do not talk about chemical or optical facts. What makes a number of individual things facts of a kind are the attributes which we select in order to treat them as members of a class. This is, of course, commonplace. But it means that, though all the social phenomena with which we can possibly deal may have physical attributes, they need not be physical facts for our purpose. That depends on how we shall find it convenient to classify them for the discussion of our problems. Are the human actions which we observe, and the objects of these actions, things of the same or a different kind because they appear as physically the same or different to us, the observers—or for some other reason?

Now the social sciences are without exception concerned with the way in which men behave toward their environment—other men or things—or I should say rather that these are the elements from which the social sciences build patterns of relationships between many men. How must we define or classify the objects of their activity if we want to explain or understand their actions? Is it the physical attributes of the objects—what we can find out about these objects by studying them—or is it by something else that we must classify the objects when we attempt to explain what men do about them? Let me first consider a few examples.

Take such things as tools, food, medicine, weapons, words, sentences, communications, and acts of production—or any one particular instance of any of these. I believe these to be fair samples of the kind of objects of human activity which constantly occur in the social sciences. It is easily seen that all these concepts (and the same is true of more concrete instances) refer not to some objective properties possessed by the things, or which the observer can find out about them, but to views which some other person holds about the things. These objects cannot even be defined in physical terms, because there is no single physical property which any one member of a class must possess. These concepts are also not merely abstractions of the kind we use in all physical sciences; they abstract from all the physical properties of the things themselves. They are all instances of what are sometimes called “teleological concepts,” that is, they can be defined only by indicating relations between three terms: a purpose, somebody who holds that purpose, and an object which that person thinks to be a suitable means for that purpose. If we wish, we could say that all these objects are defined not in terms of their “real” properties but in terms of opinions people hold about them. In short, in the social sciences the things are what people think they are. Money is money, a word is a word, a cosmetic is a cosmetic, if and because somebody thinks they are.

That this is not more obvious is due to the historical accident that in the world in which we live the knowledge of most people is approximately similar to our own. It stands out much more strongly when we think of men with a knowledge different from our own, for example, people who believe in magic. That a charm believed to protect the wearer’s life, or a ritual intended to secure good harvests, can be defined only in terms of people’s beliefs about them is obvious. But the logical character of the concepts we have to use in attempts to interpret people’s actions is the same whether our beliefs coincide with theirs or not. Whether a medicine is a medicine, for the purpose of understanding a person’s actions, depends solely on whether that person believes it to be one, irrespective of whether we, the observers, agree or not. Sometimes it is somewhat difficult to keep this distinction clearly in mind. We are likely, for example, to think of the relationship between parent and child as an “objective” fact. But, when we use this concept in studying family life, what is relevant is not that x is the natural offspring of y but that either or both believe this to be the case. The relevant character is not different from the case where x and y believe some spiritual tie to exist between them in the existence of which we do not believe. Perhaps the relevant distinction comes out most clearly in the general and obvious statement that no superior knowledge the observer may possess about the object, but which is not possessed by the acting person, can help us in understanding the motives of their actions.

The objects of human activity, then, for the purposes of the social sciences are of the same or of a different kind, or belong to the same or different classes, not according to what we, the observers, know about the objects, but according to what we think the observed person knows about it. We somehow, and for reasons which I shall presently consider, impute knowledge to the observed person. Before I go on to ask on what grounds such an imputation to the acting person of knowledge about the object is based, what this means, and what follows from the fact that we define the objects of human action in such a way, I must turn for a moment to consider the second kind of elements with which we have to deal in the social sciences: not the environment toward which the human beings behave but human action itself. When we examine the classification of different kinds of actions which we must use when we discuss intelligible human behavior, we meet precisely the same situation as we did in analyzing the classification of objects of human actions. Of the examples I have given before, the last four fall into this category: words, sentences, communications, and acts of production are instances of human actions of this kind. Now, what makes two instances of the same word or the same act of production actions of the same kind, in the sense that is relevant when we discuss intelligible behavior? Surely not any physical properties they have in common. It is not because I know explicitly what physical properties the sound of the word “sycamore” pronounced at different times by different people has in common but because I know that x or y intend all these different sounds or signs to mean the same word, or that they understand them all as the same word, that I treat them as instances of the same class. It is not because of any objective or physical similarity but because of the (imputed) intention of the acting person that I regard the various ways in which in different circumstances he may make, say, a spindle, as instances of the same act of production.

Please note that neither with respect to the objects of human activity nor with respect to the different kinds of human activity themselves do I argue that their physical properties do not come into the process of classification. What I am arguing is that no physical properties can enter into the explicit definition of any of these classes, because the elements of these classes need not possess common physical attributes, and we do not even consciously or explicitly know which are the various physical properties of which an object would have to possess at least one to be a member of a class. The situation may be described schematically by saying that we know that the objects a, b, c, . . . , which may be physically completely dissimilar and which we can never exhaustively enumerate, are objects of the same kind because the attitude of X toward them all is similar. But the fact that X’s attitude toward them is similar can again be defined only by saying that he will react toward them by any one of the actions α, β, γ, . . . , which again may be physically dissimilar and which we will not be able to enumerate exhaustively, but which we just know to “mean” the same thing.

This result of reflecting about what we are actually doing is no doubt a little disturbing. Yet there seems to me no possible doubt that this not only is precisely what we are doing, in ordinary life as well as in the social sciences, when we talk about other people’s intelligible action, but that it is the only way in which we can ever “understand” what other people do; and that, therefore, we must rely on this sort of reasoning whenever we discuss what we all know as specifically human or intelligible activities. We all know what we mean when we say that we see a person “playing” or “working,” a man doing this or that “deliberately,” or when we say that a face looks “friendly” or a man “frightened.” But, though we might be able to explain how we recognize any one of these things in a particular case, I am certain none of us can enumerate, and no science can—at least as yet—tell us all the different physical symptoms by which we recognize the presence of these things. The common attributes which the elements of any of these classes possess are not physical attributes but must be something else.

From the fact that whenever we interpret human action as in any sense purposive or meaningful, whether we do so in ordinary life or for the purposes of the social sciences, we have to define both the objects of human activity and the different kinds of actions themselves, not in physical terms but in terms of the opinions or intentions of the acting persons, there follow some very important consequences; namely, nothing less than that we can, from the concepts of the objects, analytically conclude something about what the actions will be. If we define an object in terms of a person’s attitude toward it, it follows, of course, that the definition of the object implies a statement about the attitude of the person toward the thing. When we say that a person possesses food or money, or that he utters a word, we imply that he knows that the first can be eaten, that the second can be used to buy something with, and that the third can be understood—and perhaps many other things. Whether this implication is in any way significant, that is, whether to make it explicit adds in any way to our knowledge, depends on whether, when we say to a person that this or that thing is food or money, we state thereby merely the observed facts from which we derive this knowledge or whether we imply more than that.

How can we ever know that a person holds certain beliefs about his environment? What do we mean when we say that we know he holds certain beliefs—when we say that we know that he uses this thing as a tool or that gesture or sound as a means of communication? Do we mean merely what we actually observe in the particular case, for example, that we see him chewing and swallowing his food, swinging a hammer, or making noises? Or do we not always when we say we “understand” a person’s action, when we talk about “why” he is doing this or that, impute to him something beyond what we can observe—at least beyond what we can observe in the particular case?

If we consider for a moment the simplest kinds of actions where this problem arises, it becomes, of course, rapidly obvious that, in discussing what we regard as other people’s conscious actions, we invariably interpret their action on the analogy of our own mind: that is, that we group their actions, and the objects of their actions, into classes or categories which we know solely from the knowledge of our own mind. We assume that the idea of a purpose or a tool, a weapon or food, is common to them with us, just as we assume that they can see the difference between different colors or shapes as well as we. We thus always supplement what we actually see of another person’s action by projecting into that person a system of classification of objects which we know, not from observing other people, but because it is in terms of these classes that we think ourselves. If, for example, we watch a person cross a square full of traffic, dodging some cars and pausing to let others pass, we know (or we believe we know) much more than we actually perceive with our eyes. This would be equally true if we saw a man behave in a physical environment quite unlike anything we have ever seen before. If I see for the first time a big boulder or an avalanche coming down the side of a mountain toward a man and see him run for his life, I know the meaning of this action because I know what I would or might have done in similar circumstances.

There can be no doubt that we all constantly act on the assumption that we can in this way interpret other people’s actions on the analogy of our own mind and that in the great majority of instances this procedure works. The trouble is that we can never be sure. On watching a few movements or hearing a few words of a man, we decide that he is sane and not a lunatic and thereby exclude the possibility of his behaving in an infinite number of “odd” ways which none of us could ever enumerate and which just do not fit into what we know to be reasonable behavior—which means nothing else than that those actions cannot be interpreted by analogy of our own mind. We can neither explain precisely how, for practical purposes, we know that a man is sane and not a lunatic, nor can we exclude the possibility that in one case in a thousand we may be wrong. Similarly, I shall, from a few observations, be able rapidly to conclude that a man is signaling or hunting, making love to or punishing another person, though I may never have seen these things done in this particular way; and yet my conclusion will be sufficiently certain for all practical purposes.

The important question which arises is whether it is legitimate to employ in scientific analysis such concepts as these, which refer to a state of affairs which we all recognize “intuitively” and which we not only unhesitatingly use in daily life but on which all social intercourse, all communication between men, is based; or whether we should be precluded from doing so because we cannot state any physical conditions from which we can derive with certainty that the postulated conditions are really present in any particular case, and because for this reason we can never be certain whether any particular instance is really a member of the class about which we talk—although we all agree that in the great majority of cases our diagnosis will be correct. The hesitation which we at first feel about this is probably due to the fact that the retention of such a procedure in the social sciences seems to be in conflict with the most marked tendency of the development of scientific thought in modern times. But is there really such a conflict? The tendency to which I refer has been correctly described as one toward the progressive elimination of all “anthropomorphic” explanations from the physical sciences. Does this really mean that we must refrain from treating man “anthropomorphically”—or is it not rather obvious, as soon as we put it in this way, that such an extrapolation of past tendencies is absurd?

I do not wish, of course, in this connection to raise all the problems connected with the behaviorist program, though a more systematic survey of my subject could hardly avoid doing so. Indeed, the question with which we are here concerned is nothing else than whether the social sciences could possibly discuss the kind of problems with which they are concerned in purely behavioristic terms—or even whether consistent behaviorism is possible.

Perhaps the relation between the strictly empirical factor and the part which we add from the knowledge of our own mind in interpreting another person’s action can be stated with the help of a (somewhat questionable) use of the distinction between the denotation and the connotation of a concept. What I shall in particular circumstances recognize as a “friendly face,” the denotation of the concept, is largely a matter of experience. But what I mean when I say that this is a “friendly face,” no experience in the ordinary sense of the term can tell me. What I mean by a “friendly face” does not depend on the physical properties of different concrete instances, which may conceivably have nothing in common. Yet I learn to recognize them as members of the same class—and what makes them members of the same class is not any of their physical properties but an imputed meaning.

The importance of this distinction grows as we move outside the familiar surroundings. As long as I move among my own kind of people, it is probably the physical properties of a bank note or a revolver from which I conclude that they are money or a weapon to the person holding them. When I see a savage holding cowrie shells or a long, thin tube, the physical properties of the thing will probably tell me nothing. But the observations which suggest to me that the cowrie shells are money to him and the blowpipe a weapon will throw much light on the object—much more light than these same observations could possibly give if I were not familiar with the conception of money or a weapon. In recognizing the things as such, I begin to understand the people’s behavior. I am able to fit into a scheme of actions which “make sense” just because I have come to regard it not as a thing with certain physical properties but as the kind of thing which fits into the pattern of my own purposive action.

If what we do when we speak about understanding a person’s action is to fit what we actually observe into patterns we find ready in our own mind, it follows, of course, that we can understand less and less as we turn to beings more and more different from ourselves. But it also follows that it is not only impossible to recognize, but meaningless to speak of, a mind different from our own. What we mean when we speak of another mind is that we can connect what we observe because the things we observe fit into the way of our own thinking. But where this possibility of interpreting in terms of analogies from our own mind ceases, where we can no longer “understand”—there is no sense in speaking of mind at all; there are then only physical facts which we can group and classify solely according to the physical properties which we observe.

An interesting point in this connection is that, as we go from interpreting the actions of men very much like ourselves to men who live in a very different environment, it is the most concrete concepts which first lose their usefulness for interpreting the people’s actions and the most general or abstract which remain helpful longest. My knowledge of the everyday things around me, of the particular ways in which we express ideas or emotions, will be of little use in interpreting the behavior of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. But my understanding of what I mean by a means to an end, by food or a weapon, a word or a sign, and probably even an exchange or a gift, will still be useful and even essential in my attempt to understand what they do.

3

So far the discussion has been limited to the question of how we classify individual actions and their objects in the discussion of social phenomena. I must now turn to the question of the purpose for which we use this classification. Even though concern with classifications takes up a great deal of our energies in the social sciences—so much, indeed, in economics, for example, that one of the best-known modern critics of the discipline has described it as a purely “taxonomic” science—this is not our ultimate purpose. Like all classifications, it is merely a convenient way of arranging our facts for whatever we want to explain. But before I can turn to this, I must, first, clear a common misunderstanding from our way and, second, explain a claim frequently made on behalf of this process of classification—a claim which to anyone brought up in the natural sciences sounds highly suspicious but which nevertheless follows merely from the nature of our object.

The misunderstanding is that the social sciences aim at explaining individual behavior and particularly that the elaborate process of classification which we use either is, or serves, such an explanation. The social sciences do in fact nothing of the sort. If conscious action can be “explained,” this is a task for psychology but not for economics or linguistics, jurisprudence or any other social science. What we do is merely to classify types of individual behavior which we can understand, to develop their classification—in short, to provide an orderly arrangement of the material which we have to use in our further task. Economists, and the same is probably also true in the other social sciences, are usually a little ashamed to admit that this part of their task is “only” a kind of logic. I think that they would be wise frankly to recognize and to face this fact.

The claim to which I have referred follows directly from this character of the first part of our task as a branch of applied logic. But it sounds startling enough at first. It is that we can derive from the knowledge of our own mind in an “a priori” or “deductive” or “analytic” fashion, an (at least in principle) exhaustive classification of all the possible forms of intelligible behavior. It is against this claim, rarely openly made, but always implied, that all the taunts against the economists are directed, when we are accused of spinning knowledge out of our inner consciousness and what other similar abusive epithets there are. Yet when we reflect that, whenever we discuss intelligible behavior, we discuss actions which we can interpret in terms of our own mind, the claim loses its startling character and in fact becomes no more than a truism. If we can understand only what is similar to our own mind, it necessarily follows that we must be able to find all that we can understand in our own mind. Of course, when I say that we can in principle achieve an exhaustive classification of all possible forms of intelligible behavior, this does not mean that we may not discover that, in interpreting human actions, we do use processes of thought which we have not yet analyzed or made explicit. We constantly do. What I meant is that when we discuss any particular class of intelligible action which we have defined as actions of one kind, in the sense in which I have used that term, then we can, within that field, provide a completely exhaustive classification of the forms of action which fall within it. If, for example, we define as economic actions all acts of choice which are made necessary by the scarcity of means available for our ends, we can, step by step, proceed to subdivide the possible situations into alternatives so that at each step there is no third possibility: a given means may be useful only for one or for many ends, a given end can be achieved by one or by several different means, different means may be wanted for a given end either alternatively or cumulatively, etc.

But I must leave what I have called the first part of my task and turn to the question of the use we make of these elaborate classifications in the social sciences. The answer is, briefly, that we use the different kinds of individual behavior thus classified as elements from which we construct hypothetical models in an attempt to reproduce the patterns of social relationships which we know in the world around us. But this still leaves us with the question whether this is the right way to study social phenomena. Have we not in these social structures at last definite tangible social facts which we ought to observe and measure, as we observe and measure physical facts? Should we not here at least derive all our knowledge by observing and experiencing, instead of by “constructing models” from the elements found in our own thought?

The belief that, when we turn from the action of the individual to the observation of social collectivities, we move from the realm of vague and subjective speculation to the realm of objective fact is very widespread. It is the belief held by all who think that they may make the social sciences more “scientific” by imitating the model of the natural sciences. Its intellectual basis has been most clearly expressed by the founder of “sociology,” Auguste Comte, when in a famous statement he asserted that in the field of social phenomena, as in biology, “the whole of the object is certainly much better known and more immediately accessible” than the constituent parts.2 Most of the science he attempted to create is still based on this or similar beliefs.

I believe that this view which regards social collectivities such as “society” or the “state,” or any particular social institution or phenomenon, as in any sense more objective than the intelligible actions of the individuals is sheer illusion. I shall argue that what we call “social facts” are no more facts in the specific sense in which this term is used in the physical sciences than are individual actions or their objects; that these so-called “facts” are rather precisely the same kind of mental models constructed by us from elements which we find in our own minds as those which we construct in the theoretical social sciences; so that what we do in those sciences is in a logical sense exactly the same thing as what we always do when we talk about a state or a community, a language or a market, only that we make explicit what in everyday speech is concealed and vague.

I cannot attempt here to explain this in connection with any one of the theoretical social disciplines—or, rather, in connection with the only one among them where I should be competent to do this, economics. To do so, I should have to spend far more time than I have on technicalities. But it will perhaps be even more helpful if I attempt to do so with respect to the pre-eminently descriptive and, in a sense, preeminently empirical discipline in the social field, namely, history. To consider the nature of “historical facts” will be particularly appropriate, since the social scientists are constantly advised, by those who want to make the social sciences more “scientific,” to turn to history for their facts and to use the “historical method” as a substitute for the experimental. Indeed, outside the social sciences themselves (and, it seems, particularly among logicians)3 it appears to have become almost accepted doctrine that the historical method is the legitimate path toward generalizations about social phenomena.4

What do we mean by a “fact” of history? Are the facts with which human history is concerned significant to us as physical facts or in some other sense? What sort of things are the Battle of Waterloo, the French government under Louis XIV, or the feudal system? Perhaps we shall get further if, instead of tackling this question directly, we ask how we decide whether any particular bit of information we have constitutes part of the “fact” “Battle of Waterloo.” Was the man plowing his field just beyond the extreme wing of Napoleon’s guards part of the Battle of Waterloo? Or the chevalier who dropped his snuffbox on hearing the news of the storming of the Bastille part of the French Revolution? To follow up this kind of question will show at least one thing: that we cannot define a historical fact in terms of spatiotemporal co-ordinates. Neither is everything which takes place at one time and in one place part of the same historical fact, nor must all parts of the same historical fact belong to the same time and place. The classical Greek language or the organization of the Roman legions, the Baltic trade of the eighteenth century or the evolution of common law, or any move of any army—these are all historical facts where no physical criterion can tell us what are the parts of the fact and how they hang together. Any attempt to define them must take the form of a mental reconstruction, of a model, in which intelligible individual attitudes form the elements. In most instances, no doubt, the model will be so simple that the interconnection of its parts are readily visible; and there will consequently be little justification for dignifying the model with the name of a “theory.” But, if our historical fact is such a complex as a language or a market, a social system or a method of land cultivation, what we call a fact is either a recurrent process or a complex pattern of persistent relationships which is not “given” to our observation but which we can only laboriously reconstruct—and which we can reconstruct only because the parts (the relations from which we build up the structure) are familiar and intelligible to us. To put it paradoxically, what we call historical facts are really theories which, in a methodological sense, are of precisely the same character as the more abstract or general models which the theoretical sciences of society construct. The situation is not that we first study the “given” historical facts and then perhaps can generalize about them. We rather use a theory when we select from the knowledge we have about a period certain parts as intelligibly connected and forming part of the same historical fact. We never observe states or governments, battles or commercial activities, or a people as a whole. When we use any of these terms, we always refer to a scheme which connects individual activities by intelligible relations; that is, we use a theory which tells us what is and what is not part of our subject. It does not alter the position that the theorizing is usually done for us by our informant or source who, in reporting the fact, will use terms like “state” or “town” which cannot be defined in physical terms but which refer to a complex of relationships which, made explicit, constitute a “theory” of the subject.

Social theory, in the sense in which I use the term, is, then, logically prior to history. It explains the terms which history must use. This is, of course, not inconsistent with the fact that historical study frequently forces the theorist to revise the constructions or to provide new ones in terms of which he can arrange the information which he finds. But in so far as the historian talks, not merely about the individual actions of particular people but about what, in some sense, we can call social phenomena, his facts can be explained as facts of a certain kind only in terms of a theory about how its elements hang together. The social complexes, the social wholes which the historian discusses, are never found ready given as are the persistent structures in the organic (animal or vegetable) world. They are created by him by an act of construction or interpretation—a construction which for most purposes is done spontaneously and without any elaborate apparatus. But in some connections where, for example, we deal with such things as languages, economic systems, or bodies of law, these structures are so complicated that, without the help of an elaborate technique, they can no longer be reconstructed without the danger of going wrong and being led into contradictions.

This is all the theories of the social sciences aim to do. They are not about the social wholes as wholes; they do not pretend to discover by empirical observation laws of behavior or change of these wholes. Their task is rather, if I may so call it, to constitute these wholes, to provide schemes of structural relationships which the historian can use when he has to attempt to fit together into a meaningful whole the elements which he actually finds. The historian cannot avoid constantly using social theories in this sense. He may do so unconsciously, and in fields in which the relationships are not too complex his instinct may guide him aright. When he turns to more complex phenomena such as those of language, law, or economics, and still disdains to make use of the models worked out for him by the theorists, he is almost certain to come to grief. And this “coming to grief” will significantly show itself by the theoretician either demonstrating to him that he has involved himself in contradictions or showing him that in his explanations he has asserted a sequence of “causation” which, as soon as his assumptions are made explicit, he will have to admit does not follow from his assumptions.

There are two important consequences which follow from this and which can here be only briefly stated. The first is that the theories of the social sciences do not consist of “laws” in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. All that we can and must verify is the presence of our assumptions in the particular case. We have already referred to the special problems and difficulties which this raises. In this connection a genuine “question of fact” arises—though one it will often not be possible to answer with the same certainty as is the case in the natural sciences. But the theory itself, the mental scheme for the interpretation, can never be “verified” but only tested for its consistency. It may be irrelevant because the conditions to which it refers never occur; or it may prove inadequate because it does not take account of a sufficient number of conditions. But it can no more be disproved by facts than can logic or mathematics.

There still remains, however, the question whether this kind of “compositive” theory, as I like to call it, which “constitutes” the social “wholes” by constructing models from intelligible elements, is the only kind of social theory, or whether we might not also aim at empirical generalizations about the behavior of these wholes as wholes, at laws of the changes of languages or institutions—the kind of laws which are the aim of “historical method.”

I shall not enlarge here on the curious contradiction into which the defendants of this method usually involve themselves when they first emphasize that all historical phenomena are unique or singular and then proceed to claim that their study can arrive at generalizations. The point I wish to make is rather that if, of the infinite variety of phenomena which we can find in any concrete situation, only those can be regarded as part of one object which we can connect by means of our mental models, the object can possess no attributes beyond those which can be derived from our model. Of course, we can go on constructing models which fit concrete situations more and more closely—concepts of states or languages which possess an ever richer connotation. But as members of a class, as similar units about which we can make generalizations, these models can never possess any properties which we have not given to them or which do not derive deductively from the assumptions on which we have built them. Experience can never teach us that any particular kind of structure has properties which do not follow from the definition (or the way we construct it). The reason for this is simply that these wholes or social structures are never given to us as natural units, are not definite objects given to observation, that we never deal with the whole of reality but always only with a selection made with the help of our models.5

I have not space to discuss more fully the nature of “historical facts” or the objects of history, but I should like briefly to refer to one question which, though not strictly germane to my subject, is yet not quite irrelevant. It is the very fashionable doctrine of “historical relativism,” the belief that different generations or ages must of necessity hold different views about the same historical facts. It seems to me that this doctrine is the result of the same illusion that historical facts are definitely given to us and not the result of a deliberate selection of what we regard as a connected set of events relevant to the answer of a particular question—an illusion which seems to me to be due to the belief that we can define a historical fact in physical terms by its spatiotemporal co-ordinates. But a thing so defined, say, “Germany between 1618 and 1648,” just is not one historical object. Within the space-time continuum thus defined we can find any number of interesting social phenomena which to the historian are altogether different objects: the history of Family X, the development of printing, the change of legal institutions, etc., which may or may not be connected but which are no more part of one social fact than any other two events in human history. This particular period, or any other period, is, as such, no definite “historical fact,” no single historical object. According to our interests we can ask any number of different questions referring to this period and accordingly shall have to give different answers and shall have to construct different models of connected events. And this is what historians do at different times because they are interested in different questions. But as it is only the question that we ask which singles out, from the infinite variety of social events which we can find at any given time and place, a definite set of connected events which can be termed one historical fact, the experience that people give different answers to different questions does, of course, not prove that they hold different views about the same historical fact. There is no reason whatever, on the other hand, why historians at different times, but possessing the same information, should answer the same question differently. This alone, however, would justify the thesis about an inevitable relativity of historical knowledge.

I mention this because this historical relativism is a typical product of that so-called “historicism” which is, in fact, a product of the misapplication of the scientistic prejudice to historical phenomena—of the belief that social phenomena are ever given to us as the facts of nature are given to us. They are accessible to us only because we can understand what other people tell us and can be understood only by interpreting other people’s intentions and plans. They are not physical facts, but the elements from which we reproduce them are always familiar categories of our own mind. Where we could no longer interpret what we know about other people by the analogy of our own mind, history would cease to be human history; it would then, indeed, have to run in purely behavioristic terms such as the history we might write of an ant heap or the history an observer from Mars might write of the human race.

If this account of what the social sciences are actually doing appears to you as a description of a topsy-turvy world in which everything is in the wrong place, I beg you to remember that these disciplines deal with a world at which from our position we necessarily look in a different manner from that in which we look at the world of nature. To employ a useful metaphor: while at the world of nature we look from the outside, we look at the world of society from the inside; while, as far as nature is concerned, our concepts are about the facts and have to be adapted to the facts, in the world of society at least some of the most familiar concepts are the stuff from which that world is made. Just as the existence of a common structure of thought is the condition of the possibility of our communicating with one another, of your understanding what I say, so it is also the basis on which we all interpret such complicated social structures as those which we find in economic life or law, in language, and in customs.

• 1[*] The twelfth Finlay Lecture, delivered at University College, Dublin, on December 17, 1945. Published by Hodges, Figgis & Co., Ltd., Dublin, and B. H. Blackwell, Ltd., Oxford, 1946.
• 2Both the term “individualism” and the term “socialism” are originally the creation of the Saint-Simonians, the founders of modern socialism. They first coined the term “individualism” to describe the competitive society to which they were opposed and then invented the word “socialism” to describe the centrally planned society in which all activity was directed on the same principle that applied within a single factory. See on the origin of these terms the present author’s article on “The Counter-Revolution of Science,” Economica, VIII (new ser., 1941), 146.
• 3R. Bisset, Life of Edmund Burke (2d ed., 1800), II, 429. Cf. also W. C. Dunn, “Adam Smith and Edmund Burke: Complimentary Contemporaries,” Southern Economic Journal (University of North Carolina), Vol. VII, No. 3 (January, 1941).
• 4Carl Menger, who was among the first in modern times consciously to revive the methodical individualism of Adam Smith and his school, was probably also the first to point out the connection between the design theory of social institutions and socialism. See his Untersuchungen über die Methode der Sozialwissenschaften (1883), esp. Book IV, chap. 2, toward the end of which (p. 208) he speaks of “a pragmatism which, against the intention of its representatives, leads inevitably to socialism.”
• 5Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in Works (World’s Classics ed.), IV, 105: “Thus the commonwealth itself would, in a few generations, be disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality, and at length dispersed to all winds of heaven.” That Burke (as A. M. Osborn points out in her book on Rousseau and Burke [Oxford, 1940], p. 23), after he had first attacked Rousseau for his extreme “individualism,” later attacked him for his extreme collectivism was far from inconsistent but merely the result of the fact that in the case of Rousseau, as in that of all others, the rationalistic individualism which they preached inevitably led to collectivism.