Sociology- Analysis of Weber

An analysis based on this passage from Weber:
(explain/clarify a concept, and then tie the concept to a contemporary social issue and show how the theory helps use make sense of social phenomena)
We are now at the end of this discussion, the only purpose of
which was to trace the course of the hair-line which separates
science from faith and to make explicit the meaning of the quest
for social and economic knowledge. The objective validity of all
empirical knowledge rests exclusively upon the ordering of the
given reality according to categories which are subjective in a
specific sense, namely, in that they present the presuppositions of
our knowledge and are based on the presupposition of the value of
those truths which empirical knowledge alone is able to give us.
The means available to our science offer nothing to those persons
to whom this truth is of no value. It should be remembered that the
belief in the value of scientific truth is the product of certain
cultures and is not a product of man’s original nature. Those for
whom scientific truth is of no value will seek in vain for some
other truth to take the place of science in just those respects in
which it is unique, namely, in the provision of concepts and
judgments which are neither empirical reality nor reproductions of
it but which facilitate its thought ordering in a valid manner. In the
empirical social sciences, as we have seen, the possibility of
meaningful knowledge of what is essential for us in the infinite
richness of events is bound up with the unremitting application of
viewpoints of a specifically particularized character, which, in the
last analysis, are oriented on the basis of value-ideas. These value-
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ideas are for their part empirically discoverable and analyzable as
elements of meaningful human conduct, but their validity can not
be deduced from empirical data as such. The “objectivity” of the
social sciences depends rather on the fact that the empirical data
are always related to those value-ideas which alone make them
worth knowing and the significance of the empirical data is derived
from these value-ideas. But these data can never become the
foundation for the empirically impossible proof of the validity of
the value-ideas. The belief which we all have in some form or
other, in the meta-empirical validity of ultimate and final values, in
which the meaning of our existence is rooted, is not incompatible
with the incessant changefulness of the concrete viewpoints, from
which empirical reality gets its significance. Both these views are,
on the contrary, in harmony with each other. Life with its irrational
reality and its store of possible meanings is inexhaustible. The
concrete form in which value-relationship occurs remains
perpetually in flux, ever subject to change in the dimly seen future
of human culture. The light which emanates from those highest
value-ideas always falls on an ever changing finite segment of the
vast chaotic stream of events, which flows away through time.
Now all this should not be misunderstood to mean that the proper
task of the social sciences should be the continual chase for new
viewpoints and new thought constructs. On the contrary: nothing
should be more sharply emphasized than the proposition that the
knowledge of the cultural significance of concrete historical
events and developments is exclusively and solely the final end
which, among other means, concept-construction and the criticism
of constructs also seek to serve. There are, to use the words of F.
Th. Vischer, “subject matter specialists” and “interpretative
specialists.” The fact-greedy gullet of the former can be filled only
with legal documents, statistical work-sheets and questionnaires,
but he is insensitive to the refinement of a new idea. The
gourmandise of the latter dulls his taste for facts by ever new
intellectual subtilities. That genuine artistry which, among the
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historians, Ranke possessed in such a grand measure, manifests
itself through its ability to produce new knowledge by interpreting
already known facts according to known viewpoints.
All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization,
once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through
particular settings of problems and has established its
methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as
an end in itself. It will discontinue assessing the value of the
individual facts in terms of their relationships to ultimate valueideas. Indeed, it will lose its awareness of its ultimate rootedness in
the value-ideas in general. And it is well that should be so. But
there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The
significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes
uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great
cultural problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change
its standpoint and its thinking apparatus and to view the streams of
events from the heights of thought. It follows those stars which
alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labors:
The newborn impulse fires my mind,
I hasten on, his beams eternal drinking,
The Day before me and the Night behind,
Above me Heaven unfurled,
the floor of waves beneath me.

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