Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/35151

In this paper I examine Max Weber's two methodological treatises: "Roscher and Knies" and "Critical Study on Logic of Cultural Sciences". My aim is to analyse Weber's methodology and to make it clear how its components are interrelated. When Weber talks about "lawseeking sciences" and "sciences of reality", his intetion is not to emphasize the existence of two sciences: natural sciences and cultural sciences, but to insist on the existence of two different kinds of causation. In cultural sciences every object of our (historical) study is "what it has become, and not something else" and we must select some "adequate causes" from which the object is supposed to flow out. Weber calls this selection of causes "causal attribution" and he tells that our "nomological knowledge" is the base of the validity of our selections.