Читать книгу Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science: A History (Third Edition) - Thomas J. Hickey - Страница 16

The romantic criterion for criticism is “convincing” “interpretative understanding” that “makes substantive sense” of conscious motivations, which are deemed to be the underlying “causal mechanisms” of observed human action.

Causality is an ontological concept, and all romantics impose their mentalistic ontology as a prior criterion for criticism, while making empirical or statistical analyses at most optional and supplementary.

Furthermore many romantic social scientists demand the criterion that a social theory must be identifiable in the particular investigator’s own introspectively recognized subjective personal experience. In Max Weber’s terms this is called verstehen. It is the thesis that empathetic insight is a special and valuable tool in the study of human behavior, which is without counterpart in the physical sciences. It effectively makes all sociology what has been called “pop sociology” or “folk sociology”.