Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Sociology Department. Allameh Tabataba'ie
2 Graduated with a PhD from the Sociology Group, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran
Abstract
Within a Neo-Kantian framework, this article argues that historical–cultural reality is both infinite and lacks any rational form;therefore, its scientific cognition requires a methodical reconstruction by means of concepts.The guiding question is how necessity and objectivity can arise in the cultural sciences when unity and universality are not given. First, a principle of selection clearly identifies aims and cognitive interests that demarcate the field of inquiry. Second, conceptual formation and the constitution of the object integrate selected elements into a unified order. On this basis, Rickert’s value-relevance (Wertbeziehung) explains how the “historical individual” is constructed as the object that makes history a science; values function as intersubjective criteria for selection and ordering, thereby shifting necessity from being (Sein) to validity (Geltung). In continuity with and critique of Rickert—and amid the dispute between the German Historical School and the Austrian School—Weber devises ideal types as methodological utopias and analytically testable constructs. The concrete becomes knowable only after comparison with ideal types and then, ultimately, through inductive empirical rules that determine causal and meaning adequacy. The article concludes that necessity issues not from reality itself but from the joint operation of selection and conceptual formation, so objectivity is normative-conceptual rather than metaphysical.
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