Contrary to the view associated with Hume and positivists, Weber holds
that causal claims need not take the form of generalizations or universal laws
nor even imply or rely upon them. Weber holds instead that singular causal
claims are often what is crucially relevant and sufficient, both in everyday
life and in social theory, and that these can be adequately supported. After all,
in ordinary life we often know with reasonable certainty what caused a particular
accident or success in battle without calling upon definitive causal generalizations.
Approximate or rule-of-thumb ones may well play a role as background
knowledge, for example when realizing that haste or distraction can often cause
accidents or that greater numbers or an element of surprise can be what wins
a battle—even though any precise generalization proposed on these matters
would almost surely be false. Often as well, just specifying the details that fill
out the steps of a particular case can suffice to grasp the causal linkage. These
are welcome lessons for the social sciences since they are continually under
challenge to come up with the precise and properly generalized causal laws
that the natural sciences have arrived at.
There is here, though, an important point on which we need to clarify and
partially contest Weber’s view and that of supportive commentators. Ringer
asserts (1997, 167) that “the ideal Puritan is neither a real nor an average individual,”
and that by way of empirical support for this ideal-type, “Weber does
cite statistics; but he also offers textual interpretations [of Puritan writings]
that really contribute more than any numerical data to the explanation of the
outcome that interests him.” What arises in response to this statement is a twin
worry. First, there is the concern that Ringer and possibly Weber, notwithstanding
their both being elsewhere alert to the problem, are claiming that
something is the actual meaning for a certain category of individuals when
it may be no more than an intriguing and plausible possibility, not a proper,
factually supported finding. We can allow that what Weber seeks to capture is
the essence or underlying tendency of certain persons or practices, elements
that may not be visible or prominent in the majority of cases. Still, veering
too far away from what is generally shown by commonly testable means provokes
once more the worry that an ideal-type is a theorist’s construction imposed upon reality rather than the basis for a genuine hypothesis derived from or
clearly confirmed by reality. The lesson is that there must be a closer fit than
Weber standardly admits or allows between ideal-types and the usual or average
manifestations and tendencies as empirically observable. Even in the case
of a single individual whose orientation we are trying to comprehend and explain,
there is a need to collect multiple facts and see what empirically ties them
together and constitutes their inner drift, not just what might seem to do so.
This reservation does not reduce an ideal-type to a statement about average
facts but it does warn that ideal-types must tack toward them. In sum, what
is needed is for the theorist to identify and spell out the agents’ implicit or
presumptive reasons, the ones that agents would offer or assent to as the best
articulation of their situation, which means their interpretive orientation in its
best rendering. And that best rendering leaves open that their reasons are less
than consistent or coherent, perhaps seriously defective in these regards, and,
in any case, possibly not operative, such that the theorist must proceed to correct
and supplement the hypothesis as need be to explain the outcomes.