The principal figure among the four social theorists considered is Weber, whose social theory and verstehen philosophy of scientific criticism is represented in Parsons' work as part of an immanent development culminating in Parsons' own voluntaristic theory of action.  In the present context what Weber said is of less importance than what Parsons understood and rendered Weber as having said, since it was Parsons who was the principal influence on American sociologists.  In summary Weber starts with the concept of action, which he defines as any human attitude or activity, to which the actor or actors associate a subjective meaning.  "Social action" in turn is action, which according to its subjective meaning to the actors involves the attitudes and actions of others, and is oriented to them in its course.  Finally, sociology is the science which attempts the interpretative understanding, i.e. verstehen, of social action, in order to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects.   The verstehen explanation is in terms of a motivation, which he defines as a meaning complex which to the actor or to the observer appears to be an adequate ground for his attitudes or acts.  A correct causal interpretation of action is one in which both the outward course and the motive are correctly grasped, and in which their relation to each other is "understandable" to the sociologist in the sense of verstehen.  The object of verstehen in Weber's methodology is to uncover the motivations that cause action.
          This philosophy of science is Romantic in two respects: Firstly it requires that the language of explanation contain vocabulary that references an ontology consisting of subjective experiences of the social actors, and it defines the term "theory" in social science specifically as language describing this ontology.  Secondly it requires the verstehen or introspectively based "understanding" of the motives described by statements referencing this ontology, as a criterion for scientific criticism, and defines "causal explanation" in terms of this verstehen imputation of subjective motives for observed behavior.  The requirement of verstehen may be called a strong version of the Romantic philosophy of social science, since some Romantic social scientists accept a weaker version, in which social science explanation has the subjective ontology but is not required to satisfy the verstehen criterion, because the verstehen explanations based on the social scientist's empathy have been known to differ widely from one social scientist to another.  Some Romantic social scientists who accept the weaker thesis do not believe that the social scientist should have to be able to find an explanation convincing by reference to his personal or imaginatively vicarious experience.  Historically the philosophy of science that evolved in reaction to the Romantic philosophy is Positivism.  The Positivist (or Behaviorist) philosophy of science requires the exclusion of the subjective experience required by Romantic philosophy, and either redefines the meaning of "theory" to exclude any mentalist ontology or more typically just forbids all "theory.”  Finally the contemporary Prag­matist philosophy of science, which has evolved as a criticism of Positivism after the Second World War, rejects the thesis common to both the Romanticist and the Positivist philosophies, that ontological considerations either must or may not function as criteria for scientific criticism, and it defines "theory" by reference to its function in empirical testing rather than to any ontology.
          Now consider the Parsonian neo-Weberian Romantic philosophy of science in greater detail.  Weber's philosophy of social science is a variation on the distinction between natural science and social science, that originated with the Kantian philosophical separation of the phenomenal and noumenal domains, and that gave rise to the Hegelian historicist view of explanation.  Unlike the German Historicists, however, Weber does not reject the use of universal laws in social science.  He notes that in practical daily social life people use generalizations to make reasonably reliable predictions of the reactions of other persons to a given situation, and that they succeed by imputing motives to men, by "interpreting" men's actions and words as expressions of motives.  He maintains that social scientists similarly use their access to this subjective aspect of human action, and that this access carries an immediate evidence or certainty.  The natural and social sciences, therefore, differ in that the former rely on observation of external regularities or begreifen, while the latter have the benefit of the internal or subjective knowledge of subjective motives or verstehen, which are not present in the sense data of events considered in natural science.  Weber postulated different aims for the natural and social sciences.   On Weber's view the aim of natural science is the formulation of universally applicable general laws, while the aim of social science is description of the individual uniqueness of an actual or possible historical individual.  Weber thus views social science as a historical science, while also admitting its use of general laws.  Parsons rejects this correlation of natural and social science to the analytical and the historical respectively; he maintains that both natural and social science are analytical.  Also in Weber's view there is a selectivity that every scientist brings to his subject, and he says that this selectivity is determined by the interest of the scientist; the basis for selectivity is the relevance of the subject matter to the values of the scientist.   Furthermore, it may be noted that Weber maintains that this value relevance is not the same as value judgments, and that scientific criticism is objective.   While recognizing Weber's thesis of value relevance, Parsons says that Weber did not lay sufficient emphasis on the fact that what is experienced is determined by a conceptual scheme, and that conceptual schemes are inherent in the structure of language.  It might be said that Parsons thus anticipated in important respects the contemporary Pragmatist theory of observation two decades before the Pragmatist philosophers took it over from the physicists.  Parsons says that the principle of value relevance applies to both natural and social sciences making them both analytical instead of historical sciences, and that the difference between the two types is therefore only in their subject matter and not in their logic.
          While Parsons may have anticipated the contemporary Pragmatists' philosophy of observation, he had nothing like their metatheory of evidence.  He notes that for Weber verstehen is not just a matter of immediate intuition; Weber subordinates the immediate evidence from verstehen to other considerations: verstehen must be "checked" by reference to a logically consistent system of concepts, which Parsons says is equivalent to the situation in the natural sciences, where immediate sense perception of natural events must be incorporated in a system of theoretical knowledge, because what is experienced is always determined by the general conceptual schemes that are already developed.  Parsons says that subordination of verstehen to a conceptual scheme precludes uncontrolled allegations, and he affirms that Weber had a very deep and strong ethical feeling on this point.  Parson’s neo-Weberian Romanticism has had a retarding influence in sociology.  The editorial practices prevailing today in the academic sociological journals is that each Romantic sociologist functioning as a referee uses this subjective criterion of "meaningfulness" to advance his own conceptual schemes and to suppress publication of alternative schemes proposed by other sociologists.  The result has been a caricature of scientific criticism that employs a fantasizing wizardry exhibiting such disregard for empirical evidence, that it could have startled even Baum's grand illusionist, the Wizard of Oz.   Today the iconoclastic Pragmatist philosopher of science draws back the curtain of self-delusion and exposes the Romanticists' "mechanisms.”
          Weber also takes up the question of how to establish the existence of a validly imputed causal relationship between certain features in the historical individual case and the empirical facts that existed before the historical event.  His procedure involves the practice of historical revisionism by means of thought experiments, in which historical events are viewed as cases to which general laws may be applied.  Weber calls these cases "ideal types.”  He sets forth as a principal criterion for the correct formulation of an ideal type that the combination of features used in it should be such that taken together they are meaningful, that they "make sense.”  Parsons explains this to mean that they must adequately describe a potentially concrete entity, an objectively possible case, in terms of the action frame of reference.  Two types of laws are involved in this process, both of which may occur in either the natural or social sciences; they are empirical generalizations and analytical laws.  The problem of adequate causal explanation in social science is one of adequate causal imputation to make analytical laws and also involves the relation of empirical generalizations to analytical laws.  In social science the elements related by the general laws may be ideal-type units, such as bureaucracy, or they may be more general theoretical categories, such as the rationality of action.  The statements of general law which relate these elements may be either empirical generalizations or analytical laws.  The former laws are judgments of the probable behavior under certain given circumstances of the type element.  The latter are statements of general modes of interaction among the elements and are known by verstehen.  Interestingly Parsons says that it is perfectly possible for adequate judgments of causal imputation to be arrived at in terms of type units and empirical generalizations alone, i.e. without verstehen.  But as historical cases become more complex, adequacy of explanation may require resort to more explicit formulations of the cases as ideal types containing ideal-type units related by verstehen.  But if this approach in turn is not adequate, it may become necessary to resort to more generalized theoretical categories and laws.  The less general statements are not dispensed with in this progression from empirical generalizations to analytical laws to more general analytical theory, but the analytical laws serve as an important check on the formulations of the empirical generalizations.  Parsons says that the degree to which it is necessary to push forward from empirical generalizations to analytical laws in order to attain adequate explanation, is relative to the given empirical problem at hand.  He says that this process may involve probabilistic judgments, when it is necessary to make a very complex judg­ment of causal imputation, as in the relation of the Protestant ethic to modern capitalism.  The historical individual, such as capitalism, must be analyzed into a large number of type-units, each of which is subjected to judgments of probability as to its line of development under the relevant circumstances.  In this probabilistic sense Weber speaks of adequacy, when the great majority of the causally relevant type units, such as the Protestant ethic, that might have influenced a given historical individual are favorable to the particular thesis about its development.
          Parsons advances his own methodological thesis including an architectonic scheme for the sciences based on his own ontological thesis.  Throughout the book he opposes the "reification" of any particular analytical theory, and particularly the reification by Positivists of either classical physics or classical economics.  He considers reification to be fallacious and objectionable because it is a "monistic" realism, which requires that all realistic scientific theories be reduced to one if they are not to be regarded as fictional.  Parsons proposes his own ontological thesis, which he calls "analytical realism", according to which the general concepts of science are not fictional but adequately grasp aspects of the objective external world.  Some earlier philosophers had called this type of realism "perspectivism.”  This is the realism he affirms for those concepts in analytical laws that are ideal-type units, concepts that he calls analytical elements and that Weber had regarded as fictional.  Parsons consequently rejects any reductionist view of the relation between natural and social sciences and explicitly affirms an organicist thesis of emergent properties.  This emergentism is the consequence of value relevance, and it is the basis for the frame-of-reference thesis and for Parsons' architectonic for the sciences.  Parsons identifies three reference frames that he calls the three great classes of theoretical systems: the systems of nature, the systems of action, and the systems of culture.  Parsons says the first two pertain to processes in time and are therefore empirical, while the systems of culture pertain to eternal objects such as art forms and ideas.  Examples of sciences of culture are logic, mathematics, and systems of jurisprudence, and Parsons chooses not to consider this type in his book.  The empirical analytical sciences are divided into natural sciences and sciences of action.  The latter are distinguished negatively by the irrelevance of the spatial frame of reference, and positively by the indispensability of the subjective aspect, i.e. verstehen, which is irrelevant to the natural sciences.
          The action frame of reference is fundamental to social sciences.  It consists in the irreducible framework of relations among analytical elements consisting of ideal-type units and is implied in the conception of these units.  Common to all theoretical systems or sciences sharing the action frame of reference are structural elements consisting of ends, means, conditions, and norms.  In the relations there is a normative orientation of action and a subjective point of view.  These considerations are as basic to the action frame as the space-time aspect is for the framework used for physics.  The sciences of action include the social sciences, which Parsons subdivides into economics, politics and sociology, according to three defining emergent properties.  The defining emergent property for economics is economic rationality, that for politics is "coercive rationality", and that for sociology is "common-value integration" which Parsons finds in the works of the four authors examined in his Structure of Social Action.  Thus he defines sociology as the science that attempts to develop an analytical theory of action systems, in so far as these systems can be understood in terms of the property of common-value integration.  These defining properties are emergent, because an attempt to analyze the system further results in the disappearance of these properties.  Neither economic rationality nor common-value integration is a property of unit acts in an action system apart from their organic relations to other acts in the same action system, and the action system furthermore must be adequately complex so these properties can be observed.  Consider further Parsons' ontology: Parsons says that value relevance applies equally to both social and natural science, and he rejects any implication of complete relativism by the thesis of value relevance.  Following Weber he limits relativism to specific modes of its application within the action frame of reference and he excludes it from applying to the action frame itself.  The reader will note that this exclusion is a completely ad hoc limitation.  Furthermore Parsons maintains that all different conceptual schemes proceeding from different values or interests must be translatable into one another or into some wider scheme, so that the whole position is not overthrown by skepticism.   This too is ad hoc; the history of science does not reveal such reductionism, and it is not implied by Parsons' analytical realism.  Parsons is unprepared to accept the contemporary Pragmatist ontological relativity and theoretical pluralism, because he thinks such a view implies skepticism.  He says that the development of scientific knowledge is to be regarded as a process of asymptotic approach to a limit, which can never actually be achieved.
          In 1951 Parsons published his principal contribution to theoretical sociology, the Social System.  This work is his implementation at a rather abstract level of the verstehen procedure of causal explanation, the vicarious imputation of motivations for social action.  In the Social System he calls this implementation of verstehen "motivational analysis" and "dynamic analysis.”  Motivated behavior is action that is oriented to the attainment of gratifications or to the avoidance of depredations according to the actor's expectations as defined by the value system in the social culture.  Parsons thus sets forth his "fundamental dynamic theorem of sociology": the stability of any social system depends on the integration of a common value pattern into the motivating need dispositions of the personalities of the members of the social system.  This integration is achieved by institutionalization.  An institution is a cluster of interdependent role patterns, which are integrated into the personalities of the social members by motivational processes or "mechanisms" called socialization.  And tendencies to deviance from these role patterns are counteracted by mechanisms called social control.  These integrating mechanisms of socialization and social control produce tendencies to social equilibrium.  The motivational processes operate to create and maintain social structures such as roles and institutions, and these structures in turn operate to satisfy the functional prerequisites of the social system.  Parsons identifies four basic institutional role clusters, which have associated collectivities of social members, and which have their basis in four corresponding functional prerequisites for a social system.  They are: (1) the family, which functions to control sex relations and to perform the socialization of new members, (2) the economy, which functions to organize the instrumental achievement roles and the stratification of the society, (3) politics, which functions to organize the roles pertaining to power, force, and territoriality, and finally (4) religion, which functions to integrate value orientations with cognitive orientations and personality.  Parsons refers to his sociological theory as structural-functional. The motivational dynamics induces voluntary conformity to prevailing role patterns and thereby produces a tendency to social equilibrium.  Changes produced by this tendency are changes within the existing structures of the social system.  But there are also changes of the structures of the social system, which is referred to by the phrase "social change.”   Parsons says that a general theory of the processes of change of social systems is not possible at present, because such a theory would require a complete knowledge of the laws of the motivational processes of the system.  He therefore says that the theory of change of the structure of social systems must be a theory of particular subprocesses of change within such systems, and not of the overall processes of change of the system as a system.  And in this context he affirms that it is possible to have knowledge in the form of empirical generalizations that certain changes do in fact occur under certain conditions.  But he still maintains that an action theory of social change must include the motivational analyses, and may not merely be a system of empirical generalizations.

Habermas on Weber

          Weber’s problematic views on the aim(s) of social science continue to exercise social scientists and philosophers of the social sciences.  In “The Dualism of the Natural and Cultural Sciences” in his On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1988) Jurgen Habermas discusses an ambiguity in Weber’s corpus about the problem of irrational purposeful action.  This book contains a clear rendering of Weber’s philosophy of social science.  Ideally social science should be a combination of explanatory empirical uniformities found in the natural sciences and interpretative or hermeneutic understanding of meaning and motivations found in the cultural sciences.  When the social actor chooses means that are adequate to realize his motivating purpose, the sociologist can grasp the meaning and motive of the actor and also relate the actors’ behavior and its outcome in valid empirical explanations.  But when the social actor’s choice of means is not effective and therefore not rational, the sociologist may be able to observe an explanatory empirical uniformity in observed behavior, but not be able to impute a valid interpretative understanding.  In his Economy and Society Weber admitted that research might discover noninterpretable uniformities underlying what appears to be meaningful action. This inconsistency gave rise to Weber’s ambiguity in his attempt to relate empirical explanation and interpretative understanding.  On the one hand in “Science as a Vocation” Weber values the practical and informative nature of valid empirical explanations for social policy and planning, when he says that they supply knowledge of the technique by which one masters life – external things as well as social action – through calculations.  In this context Weber was willing to recognize empirical explanations without interpretative understanding, and the role of the interpretation of subjective meaning is merely to open the way to the empirical social facts.  Thus Habermas says that in the context of the controversy over value judgments Weber subordinates the requirement for interpretative understanding to the requirement for empirical explanation.  On the other hand he says that in other contexts Weber maintains that cultural science cannot exhaust its interest in empirical uniformities, because sociology has an aim that is different from that of natural science, and Weber was unwilling to give sociology the status of a natural science of society.  In “Objectivity in Social Science” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences Weber views the empirical laws as only preparatory to the aim of making their basis and nature understandable, which he says is autonomous to the empirical investigation. Like most Romantics Weber had a Positivist idea of the natural sciences, but his ambiguity about method principally originates in the conflicting aims of social science as empirical and as cultural investigations.  This dualism noted by Habermas might be called “Weber’s dilemma”, and German Romantic that he is, Habermas, who also views natural science through the lenses of Positivist philosophy, opts for interpretative understanding.  Irrational purposeful action is not exceptional.  Social actors often fail to realize the consequences of their motivated actions, and may even have other consequences in mind. Merton examined at length the irrelevance of subjective motivations to objective consequences.

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