The Search for a Methodology of Social Science

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. The Earlier Conversation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Two Generations

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 3-5

   3. Beyond the Enlightenment: Comte and the New Problem of Social Science

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 6-28

   4. Mill and ‘The Ascent to Causes’

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 29-59

   5. Quetelet: Rates and their Explanation

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 60-91

   6. The Interregnum

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 92-104

3. Durkheim as a Methodologist

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 105-105

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   2. Realism, Teleology, and Action

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 107-123

   3. Collective Forces, Causation, and Probability

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 124-143

   4. Durkheim’s Individual

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 144-160

4. Weber on Action

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 161-161

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   2. Objective Possibility and Adequate Cause

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 163-179

   3. Rationality and Action

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 180-197

   4. Large-Scale Explanations: Aggregation and Interpretation

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 198-218

   5. The End of the Ascent

      • Stephen P. Turner

      Pages 219-227

5. Back Matter

   Pages 228-255

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Stephen Turner has explored the ongms of social science in this pioneering study of two nineteenth century themes: the search for laws of human social behavior, and the accumulation and analysis of the facts of such behavior through statistical inquiry. The disputes were vigorously argued; they were over questions of method, criteria of explanation, interpretations of probability, understandings of causation as such and of historical causation in particular, and time and again over the ways of using a natural science model. From his careful elucidation of John Stuart Mill's proposals for the methodology of the social sciences on to his original analysis of the methodological claims and practices of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, Turner has beautifully traced the conflict between statistical sociology and a science offactual description on the one side, and causal laws and a science of nomological explanation on the other. We see the works of Comte and Quetelet, the critical observations of Herschel, Buckle, Venn and Whewell, and the tough scepticism of Pearson, all of these as essential to the works of the classical founders of sociology. With Durkheim's essay on Suicide and Weber's monograph on The Protestant Ethic, Turner provides both philosophical analysis to demonstrate the continuing puzzles over cause and probability and also a perceptive and wry account of just how the puzzles of our late twentieth century are of a piece with theirs. The terms are still familiar: reasons vs.

• John Stuart Mill
• Max Weber
• argue
• buckle
• enlightenment
• individual
• interpret
• model
• rationality
• realism
• reason
• scepticism
• science
• sociology
• time

• Department of Sociology, University of South Florida, USA

  Stephen P. Turner

Policies and ethics