Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 532538

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Where explanation ends: Understanding as the place the spade turns

in the social sciences
Stephen Turner
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Explanations implicitly end with something that makes sense, and begin with something that does not
Available online 23 December 2012 make sense. A statistical relationship, for example, a numerical fact, does not make sense; an explanation
of this relationship adds something, such as causal information, which does make sense, and provides an
Keywords: endpoint for the sense-making process. Does social science differ from natural science in this respect?
Understanding One difference is that in the natural sciences, models are what need understanding. In the social
Models sciences, matters are more complex. There are models, such as causal models, which need to be under-
Mechanisms
stood, but also depend on background knowledge that goes beyond the model and the correlations that
Causal modeling
Max Weber
make it up, which produces a regress. The background knowledge is knowledge of in-lling mechanisms,
Explanation which are normally made up of elements that involve the direct understanding of the acting and believ-
ing subjects themselves. These models, and social science explanations generally, are satisfactory only
when they end the regress in this kind of understanding or use direct understanding evidence to decide
between alternative mechanism explanations.
2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

When is an explanation in social science complete? Are the
kinds of things social scientists ordinarily work with, such as
mechanisms (Hedstrom & Swedberg, 1998) and causal models,
actually explanatory or do they depend on something else which
is the real end-point of these explanations? Another way of posing
the problem might be this: When is an explanation complete, com-
plete in the sense that it is satisfactory on its own terms? One
answer, which applies both to the natural sciences and the social
sciences, would involve understanding, in the sense of intelligibil-
ity. We do not have a complete explanation if the explanation itself
is not intelligible, for example if it is merely a correlation or a math-
ematical device that enables prediction. In the physical sciences,
intelligibility as a criterion for the adequacy of scientic explana-
tion lost its centrality in the face of the problem of action at a
distance, where prediction worked nicely but conicted with in-
grained intuitions about how the physical world worked
(Laudan, 1981, p. 216). But this was not the end of intelligibility,
as we have seen in other contributions to this issue. Physical
intuitions remain important even in the most recherch areas of
microphysics. In social science, matters were different. The intelli-
gibility of action and belief remained important to history, cultural
and social anthropology, and to models of rational action. But anal-
ogous issues over the status of intelligibility or understanding arose
from two sources: the problem of the explanatory status of statisti-
cal methods which produced results that predicted relatively suc-
cessfully but had no theoretical grounding, and the problem of
evaluating the explanatory claims of problematic models and
theories that were produced by consciously imitating what were ta-
ken to be the predictive goals and formal practices of physical
science.
These issues are deeply rooted in controversies about the status
of the human sciences that were already well-developed in the
nineteenth century (Feest, 2010). Understanding was a term
with established meanings. One derives from the interpretation
of texts (hermeneutics) and leads to such notions as the hermeneu-
tic circle, which I will ignore. The other is classically formulated by

E-mail address: turner@usf.edu

0039-3681/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2012.12.001
 S. Turner / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 532538
Max Weber as follows:
Understanding may be of two kinds: the rst is the direct obser-
vational understanding of the subjective meaning of a given act
as such, including verbal utterances. We thus understand by
direct observation, in this case, the meaning of the proposition
2  2 = 4 when we hear or read it. This is a case of the direct
rational understanding of ideas. We also understand an out-
break of anger as manifested by facial expression, exclamations
or irrational movements. This is direct observational under-
standing of irrational emotional reactions. We can understand
in a similar observational way the action of a woodcutter or
of somebody who reaches for the knob to shut a door or who
aims a gun at an animal. This is rational observational under-
standing of actions. (Weber, 1978, p. 8)
Direct understanding is non-inferential, in the sense that it does not
depend on reasoning from data, theories, knowledge not immedi-
ately present, or assumptions. It is direct in the sense that it is
not inferred from other facts. Weber pointed out that normal inten-
tional explanation, which he considered under the label of explan-
atory understanding, is indirect, and involves inferential elements,
such as the setting and course of events of which the act or state-
ment forms a part:
Understanding may, however, be of another sort, namely
explanatory understanding. Thus we understand in terms of
motive the meaning an actor attaches to the proposition twice
two equals four, when he states it or writes it down, in that
we understand what makes him do this at precisely this
moment and in these circumstances. Understanding in this
sense is attained if we know that he is engaged in balancing a
ledger or in making a scientic demonstration, or is engaged
in some other task of which this particular act would be an
appropriate part. (Weber, 1978, p. 8)
This kind of understanding plays a role in science as well, if only the
limited role of understanding the theories and scientic activities of
others. In Webers account, explanatory understanding includes
rational understanding of motivation, which consists in placing
the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of meaning.
In these cases the explanation involves additional non-inferential
meaning or understanding elements, but also additional causal
elements, such as, in this case, the causal relation between a com-
mand and the performance of the act.1
In what follows, I will pursue a more modest aim than resolving
the larger issues of the ultimate relation of understanding to expla-
nation. Instead I will consider two distinct but commonplace and
representative kinds of social science models that appear far
removed from understanding: structural equation (or causal)
models and a class of models which idealize and simplify complex
situations, those of economic theory. My aim in each case will be to
show the ways in which direct understanding in the sense outlined
by Weber plays a role in these models, and particularly in complet-
ing the model as an explanation. In neither case is this role, or even
the necessity of appealing to understanding, obvious from the
outset.
By completing the explanation, I will have in mind the follow-
ing. In the case of causal (structural equation) models, it is ordinar-
ily understood that the basic point of the model is to warrant
predictions, but that some predictions generalize and others do
not, for example because they hold accidentally within a given
1
For a more elaborate discussion of the non-inferential character of this kind of understanding, see Turner (2011b).
2
Needless to say, I will not attempt to cover the vast literature of the last two centuries on the nature of this kind of statistical causality. A selection of the major texts is in
Stephen Turner, Causality, 2010, Sage. This includes an introduction with a concise (non-formal) explanation of the formal issues.
533
population. The goal is a model that is structural, a loosely
understood term that means that the model captures some sort
of actually operative causal relationships as distinct from mere
correlations or correlations that predict but for reasons that are
not genuinely causal, such as accidents of distribution in the pop-
ulation. I will argue that excluding correlations that are not genu-
inely causal depends on background knowledge that, in the case of
the core social sciences, ultimately requires elements of the
understanding of action in Webers sense. An analogous issue
arises with economic models, with the same result. The role of this
particular kind of understanding in social science models thus
contrasts with the case of models in the physical and biological
sciences, which require only that the model itself be understood.
1. Causal models in social science and their limits
In formal terms, there are no sharp distinctions between social
science models and natural science models: probabilistic relation-
ships, error, estimation, poorly understood empirical relationships,
and conscious simplications which eliminate variables that make
little difference for prediction, are found in each. Similar statistical
methods appear in each area, especially in medical contexts, nota-
bly epidemiology, which often involve mixtures of behavioral and
biological variables. The key issues with these statistical models
can be discussed in terms of the paradigm case of causal models,
or directed acyclic graphs representing causal systems (Freedman,
2005; Glymour, Scheines, Spirtes, & Kelly, 1987, pp. 6367; Pearl,
2000; Woodward, 2005, 2007). In this section I will deal with these
issues in three steps: to consider the key in principle aspects of
these models that distinguish them from models in natural science
involving laws,2 to describe a simple example from social epidemi-
ology, and to consider the way the issue of statistical models vs.
mechanisms has been discussed in the recent social science
literature.
The in principle issues with these models can be seen in their
simplest form with the simplest causal model: one containing a
single correlation, measuring the variation around a regression line
dened by an equation involving two variables, a zero-order cor-
relation. The relationship dened by the equation is purely statis-
tical. It enables one to predict values of one variable from another.
It has no direction. It is not possible to say anything causal about
the relationship on the basis of correlation alone. To convert a cor-
relation into a causal claim requires adding two kinds of claims.
One involves the causal character of the relation itself. It must
qualify as a possible causal relation. The second is that the ob-
served relation must not be accounted for by another causal rela-
tion, that it is not spurious, the result of common causes, or
confounded with the real cause, meaning that it is not the product
of a correlation between the apparent causal variable and the real
causal variable. These claims are unusual, and problematic: the lat-
ter is negative, a claim about the non-existence of relevant causes;
the former is a claim about possibility.
The causal relationships that are represented in causal models
differ from familiar law relationships in several critical ways.
The rst is non-generalizability. Unlike laws, these causal relations
are not universal: they hold for a particular population or situation
and may not generalize beyond it (Glymour, 1983). They cannot be
converted into laws by specifying the conditions under which
the causal relationship holds, because the conditions are not spec-
iable in advance: new causal relations involving new causal
mechanisms can develop and interfere with the relationship, so
534 S. Turner / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 532538
that the original observed relationship will cease to hold. The sec-
ond is a result of the fact that the variation around the regression
line may not be random: subsets of the populations for which the
relationship has been dened may not exhibit the relationship
(this is the basis of Simpsons paradox [Blyth, 1972; Charig,
1995; Julious & Mullee, 1994; Simpson, 1951]), and indeed, divid-
ing the population into two subsets may reverse the relationship,
so that a positive relation from the x to the y axis may appear in
the subsets as negative relationships or the relationship may
diminish or simply disappear. The existence of a correlation, in
short, may indicate nothing about actual causal relations. In what
follows a case of this kind will be discussed. The third difference,
which follows from the second, is that the mere existence of a cor-
relation, unlike the existence of a strict law, does not exclude the
possibility of alternative explanations consistent with the same
data. This is the problem of confounding.
So what does causal mean to these models? As Judea Pearl
notes in Causality, the causal relationship found in statistics is a
negative one: not affected by is . . . the only causal notion that
has found a place in statistics textbooks (2000, p. 139n). This def-
inition begs the question of what affect means in the rst place,
and there is a good reason for doing so: although there are many
ways of thinking about cause that work for the positive claim of
cause, such as through the notion of intervention, they typically
do not work very well for the negative claim. To put this in its most
simple terms, to get from a correlation to a strong causal interpre-
tation of the correlation requires additional knowledge: some basis
for thinking that the correlation is causal, and a very strong basis
for thinking that the relation is not the product of other causes.
The raw notion of cause mentioned by Pearl works with both types
of causal claims, the positive and the negative ones. The in princi-
ple problem with these two knowledge conditions is that the sec-
ond one creates a regress: to make the negative not the product of
other causal claims requires causal knowledge, knowledge about
what is affected by what in the setting of the causal interpretation.
The reasoning in causal modeling can be seen in a simple exam-
ple. There is a known correlation between maternal obesity and in-
fant mortality in the United States (Salihu et al., 2008, p. 2010).
Obesity is thus a predictor. However, if one divides mothers into
subsets by race, the relationship disappears for White women
and becomes stronger, meaning predictive with less variation (or
error), for Black women. To assure ourselves that we have iden-
tied a real relationship, however, we need to rule out other pos-
sible causes that would produce the same result. One possibility
would be that the two racial groups received different levels of
care. One can divide or statistically correct for this variable and
see if the relationships still hold. The researchers, using their back-
ground causal knowledge of the setting, knew this was possible,
and needed to exclude the possibility. There were available mea-
sures of the number of pre-natal visits, and so forth. Correcting
for these made no statistical difference to the mortality outcomes,
meaning that there were no differences between groups divided
into categories corresponding to these causes. Many other poten-
tially relevant variables were also tested, and these also made no
difference. The fact that it made no statistical difference justies
a does not affect claim, thus excluding it from the model.
What marks the boundaries of the model, of what is causally
relevant? Excluding possible causes for making no difference is
central. But establishing a cause, showing that it belongs in a cau-
sal model, requires more. In this case, it is still quite unclear that
the relation in question is causal. In this case maternal obesity af-
fects infant mortality for Black women, but this relation does not
3
The status of the assumptions that need to be made to enable the surrogates to produce causal conclusions, and the extent to which the assumptions rather than the data
determine the causal conclusions, is controversial. For an introduction to these issues see the exchanges between David Freedman et al. and Clark Glymour et al. in McKim &
Turner (1997, pp. 81182; pp. 183322) and Freedman (2005).
generalize to White women. But we do not know why. It might
be that there is a common cause which produces both obesity
and infant mortality in Black women that does not affect White
women. Or it could be that there is a causal relation that holds,
for some unknown reason, only within the Black population. The
correlations cannot distinguish the two possibilities, or the possi-
bility that some other unknown cause is being confounded with
race, meaning that it is correlated with race and might also be a
cause of infant mortality. When can one be assured that there is
no common cause or confounder? Whether a particular variable
hypothesized to be a cause belongs in the model, that is to say is
causally relevant, is, on the surface, an empirical question: does
it stand in a relation of no affect or not? But the empirical answer
we can give only provides evidence of correlation: the apparent
causal relation may be the product of confounding. Moreover,
when there is no observed correlation, the genuine causal rela-
tion may be obscured by the effects of unincluded and unknown
causes. In short, we have a regress, in which each attempt to estab-
lish a causal relation as structural requires prior causal knowledge.
This case reveals two important oddities about this kind of
cause. The rst involves the demarcation of what falls inside
and outside the model. Whether a variable should be included in
the model or not is a causal question of the same kind as the ques-
tion of whether a relationship between two variables is causal: it is
both an empirical question, of whether there is a correlation, and a
question about two kinds of possibility, whether the relationship in
a given direction is itself causally possible and whether there are
possible confounders or common causes. The last two questions
are not empirical in the sense of the rst. The rst requires only
statistical knowledge. The last two questions require knowledge
of another kind, background knowledge that would warrant claims
about whether a particular causal relationship is possiblethe only
way of assuring the does not affect claimor whether the class of
possibly relevant additional causes is empty.
Neither can be answered directly, and one can see why with the
example of maternal obesity and infant mortality. Because of the
problem of non-generalizability, unless the relations involve a
law and are therefore universal, there is a question of whether a
relation which is causal in one situation, such as an experiment,
is causal in the situation in question. This was one of the issues
in the long-running dispute over whether smoking caused cancer:
even if the effect could be produced with experiments with ani-
mals, there was still the question of whether this was what was
going on with humans. The prominent statistician Ronald Fisher
argued that there was reason to believe that the correlation in hu-
mans was spurious: that there were common features that both
gave people the propensity to smoke and to get cancer (Fisher,
1958, 1959). If these features could be identied, and more detail
could be given about the character of the causal relation involved
in these features, they could be further examined; but the possibil-
ity could not be excluded by either the statistical evidence or the
experiments on cases that were not part of the population in
question.
Whether there are such causes not included in the model is not
an empirical question that we can, in principle, answer. The only
answers we can get are for surrogates for this question, which
we can assume give the results of the unanswerable causal ques-
tion.3 We can answer the question of whether there is no affect
indirectly by assuming that there are no relevant variables other
than the ones we can think of to test. But this amounts to making
the causal conclusion depend on the limits of our imagination. We
can test for a wide array of nuisance variables such as race and
 S. Turner / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 532538
education which are commonly associated with causal variables. But
this guarantees nothing about those possible causal variables that
are not associated. Or we can devise statistical tests that indicate
where there are anomalies in the correlations that indicate missing
variables. Anomalous unaccounted for correlation in a path of causa-
tion, for example, indicates the presence of a missing variable. These
statistical methods, however, cannot be purely statistical: identify-
ing and limiting the possible paths of causation requires background
knowledge. So the problem of completing a causal model leads in
two directions: to background knowledge of what is and is not pos-
sibly causal (call this, for convenience, the qualitative part of the
claim), which is indispensable, and to further statistical evidence,
which is not sufcient on its own and itself requires further back-
ground knowledge to qualify it as causal.
What is background knowledge? It is easier to say what it needs
to do: to warrant the negative qualitative part of the no cause
claim. What knowledge would do that? The rough answer is
knowledge of mechanisms or possible mechanisms. In some cases,
such as those involving the biological mechanisms in epidemiolog-
ical studies, claims about the non-possibility of particular relations
of causal dependence might be warranted by something resem-
bling well-conrmed general laws, or by experimental evidence
that is presumed to generalize. In other cases, they might be war-
ranted by general knowledge about biological mechanisms. In
other cases, they might be warranted by knowledge of the tempo-
ral character of the relevant mechanisms. But there is a problem of
logical priority in the relation between the use of temporal order
and the appeal to mechanisms. Temporal order is often used as a
surrogate for background knowledge of causal order. The example
illustrates the problem with this usage: race may be genetic, and
thus temporally prior, but its causal signicance may be continu-
ous, in social interaction, and the nature of the causal relation
may change over time as well. In short, temporally preceding can
be used as a surrogate for no affect only when background
knowledge of the relevant mechanisms justies it, a point to be
made clearer shortly.
A typical example in the status attainment literature in sociol-
ogy, one of the largest and most successful examples of the appli-
cation of these methods, is the concern with the relations of
variables such as grandfathers level of education, measured by
such things as completion of high school, and grandchilds social
status at age forty. Knowledge about when the process of high
school education occurs and of the biology and demography of par-
enthood warrants the exclusion of the possibility that the high
school education of a grandparent would be affected by the status
of the grandchild. One might class this as well-conrmed general
knowledge, unproblematically extended to the cases at hand. In
this case, the extension might be justied, but it is justied only
because we know something about how status works in the popu-
lation, or society, in question, which is to say we have knowledge
about typical mechanisms leading to status level. And this need
for knowledge about mechanisms is a general problem. Time order
would be misleading if the relevant mechanisms involved contin-
uous effects, for example.
In the case of obesity and infant mortality, one can see how
background knowledge works, and why the explanation is incom-
plete. The analyst has predictive knowledge, but a weak under-
standing of the mechanisms in operation. Are there distinctive
physical processes operating in obese Black women? Or is obesity
a marker of some distinctive social and cultural status, perhaps
stigmatized, which produces continuous conduct, by the mother,
the care-givers, or by others, which leads in some way to the
4
It goes without saying that there may be ineliminable underdetermination with respect to explanatory understanding hypotheses. But for Weber at least, there is a point
direct understandingwhere underdetermination ends. This will be discussed again in the last section of this article.
535
mother being treated differently or acting in ways which increase
the probability of infant death? These are empirical questions, and
although it might be possible to devise statistical tests of hypoth-
eses constructed based on them, with measurable variables that
corresponded to the mechanisms in the hypotheses, even this kind
of evidence is indirect evidence of the operation of the mechanisms
themselves. More direct evidence of the mechanisms operating in
these cases would override this kind of statistical evidence. To put
this in a different way, there is a question of whether obesity has
the same meaning for Black and White women. And this is a ques-
tion that can be examined by looking at the beliefs, the inferences
others make in their interactions with these women, the conse-
quences of these interactions for the women, and at whether there
are distinctive beliefs, attitudes, and so forth with consequences
for action among these women themselves and those they interact
with that have causal consequences.
These questions cannot be avoided, simply because of the prob-
lem of the need to exclude alternative causal explanations that
confound or provide a common cause in order to warrant causal
claims. But what sort of knowledge is the relevant background
knowledge of human action? In practice, the analyst knows a lot
about what sorts of beliefs and attitudes are possible, meaning that
they can imagine them or come to imagine them. In principle, they
are the possible objects of understandingdirect understanding, in
Webers sense, or what he calls explanatory understanding, moti-
vational or intentional understanding which involves some ele-
ments that are directly understood. There is a mutual relation
between direct understanding and imagined or possible beliefs
and attitudes: one might conrm an imagined explanation by di-
rectly understanding an action, or come to expand what we can
imagine by directly understanding. This is where the regress ends,
and where the explanation becomes, in this sense, complete: there
is nothing in the way of justication beyond direct understanding
as dened by Weber. It is non-inferential. Nor is it possible to com-
plete an inlling explanation for a correlation involving human ac-
tion without appealing to this kind of fact, either as part of the
proposed explanation or in the course of excluding possible rival
explanations.4
2. The mechanisms dispute in sociology and ideal-types
The need for this kind of background knowledge, together with
the superiority of mechanisms over correlational evidence, raises
general questions about the meaning of statistical causal knowl-
edge in social science. It seems as if possessing knowledge of
mechanisms makes the statistical claims redundant or simply infe-
riorat best an abstract but largely contentless depiction of rela-
tionships that are only fully explained by in-lling explanations
which involve such things as knowledge of the human actions that
link the inputs and outputs. This is the conclusion that motivates
the discussion of mechanisms that has actually occurred in social
science, and particularly sociology, over the last twenty-ve years.
The motivation for this discussion was the development of causal
models which predicted status attainment, but in which the links
were unclear. The defenders of these models claimed that their ap-
proach was scientic and that prediction was the primary aim of
science. The lack of specicity about the actual causal processes in
causal models produced a reaction, in the form of an argument to
the effect that social science (meaning essentially sociological
rather than economic, for reasons that will become clear shortly)
uses of these techniques are not adequate, and that social scientists
536 S. Turner / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 532538
ought to seek mechanisms, which are taken to be more fully
explanatory than correlations (Hedstrm, 2005, pp. 1133).
The idea of mechanisms is not well-dened in this literature,
despite many attempts, but the basic thought is this: there are
explanatory structures that are neither laws nor correlations, but
rather constructions that link inputs and outputs by specifying a
model of how some set of causal or intentional connections to-
gether produce the outputs based on the inputs and is relatively
robust over some class of inputs or outputs or at least input or out-
put magnitudes. This robustness makes them relatively autono-
mous objects, which can be said to operate or not operate.
Mechanisms differ from causal models in that they have more con-
tent. Some of what gures as background knowledge in connec-
tion with causal modeling, but is not made an explicit part of the
models, becomes, for the proponents of mechanisms, an explicit
part of the account of the mechanism itself.
A typical example of a mechanism is Robert Mertons account of
machine politics (Merton, 1968, pp. 13036): the Bosses secure
the support of disprivileged groups, such as recent immigrants,
by providing services or enabling access to public services. Support,
which appears irrational, now makes sense as rational by identify-
ing the processes by which each side benets. This mechanism
does not automatically develop out of the conditions of exclusion
and so forth, but needs to be employed by a Boss, in a series of ac-
tions, in order to work like any complex scheme of exchange. But it
is also a model or scheme that can be employed analogically by
others in similar settings.
Mechanisms in this sense have the same applies when it ap-
plies character of causal models: they are there to account for in-
put-output relationships with similar inputs and outputs, but the
inputs and outputs do not determine the appearance of the mech-
anism nor produce it. The same inputs can produce the same out-
puts by other means, and the same inputs can produce different
outputs. The epistemic function of mechanisms is this: they are
free-oating intelligibility-producing devices that ll in between
inputs and outputs in a way that is more satisfyingmore under-
standing-producingthan predictors which cannot be excluded a
priori as no affect relations.
When are mechanism explanations complete? They seem to be
complete when the elements of the mechanism are screwed to-
gether and work to connect the inputs to the outputs. In contexts
such as epidemiology, the issue is often a matter of identifying a
possible physical mechanism that would connect the condition
and the result. Further non-statistical research would be needed
to validate a hypothesized mechanism. If mechanisms are better
explainers than correlations, it would be odd if the elements were
merely correlations themselves. Then one would have to ask why
causal models are any different than mechanisms. One answer
might be that mechanisms resemble genuinely explanatory mod-
els that are already intelligible to us. But this would make the intel-
ligibility that is conferred into the intelligibility given by analogy.
So the answer needs to involve the content of the mechanism,
and some criteria for, or at least some ideas about, deciding that
the elements make sense and add up to something. In the case of
mechanisms involving human action, the mechanism is fully
developed only when the linkages are specied in terms of action
explanations which refer to beliefs, pro-attitudes, and relevant sit-
uational elements, and sociologists have argued for methodological
criteria along these lines (Hedstrm, 2008).
3. Ideal-types
If there is nothing more to the notion of mechanisms in the con-
text of the human sciences than that they are idealizations of com-
plex sets of action patterns, we are in familiar territory: these are
ideal-types. This may not seem to be a very useful result. Ideal-
types have a confusing literature as well. Yet the history is a reveal-
ing one. The critique of the concept of ideal-types reveals that
the original arguments against the concept framed by Hempel
(1963), which de-legitimated it as a scientic strategy, depended
on the idea that social science would or at least could in principle
develop general theories composed of laws. This idea is no longer
plausible, and subsequent developments, including the new role
of rational choice and the problem of its status, point to some dif-
ferent conclusions about the ideal-type.
In returning to ideal-types we enter into a morass of termino-
logical confusion. The term ideal-type was originally used to con-
trast to theory, which in turn was used to refer to overarching
perspectives. In terms of the neo-Kantianism in which this distinc-
tion was framed, the contrast makes sense: theories were concep-
tual orderings of an entire domain of science which purported to
supply additional intelligibility by creating a logical hierarchy be-
tween descriptive concepts that also makes sense of the descrip-
tive conceptsfor example the concepts in the domain of
political authority descriptions, such as sovereigntyby showing
how they relate to one another. The concepts are taken to be con-
stitutive of the domain. Ideal-types, in contrast, are not constitu-
tive of a domain, and do not purport to reveal the inner logic of
relations of concepts in a domain. This original set of distinctions
was not carried over to Anglo-American writings of the post-war
period. The language of the discrepancy between concepts and
reality, which was associated with a pass neo-Kantian epistemol-
ogy (and unintelligible within the positivist account of concept
formation that identied this term with constructing laws [Hem-
pel, 1970]), was dropped by such prominent expositors as Parsons
(Parsons, 1968, p. 598). Webers specic ideal-type construc-
tions, for example of bureaucracy, were simply redescribed in the
language of behavioral science as theories, for instance Webers
theory of bureaucracy (cf. Gouldner, 1954, pp. 1924). What
has changed since the critique of the ideal-type in recent philoso-
phy of science is a shift from a focus on theory to a focus on mod-
els. This raises another possibility: that the ideal-type is a better t
with the methodological Zeitgeist now than it was then.
Ideal-types are apply when they apply intelligibility-produc-
ing devices that idealize by simplifying a complex and messy real-
ity. They work by picking out the elements that appear in multiple
cases, which resemble other cases to various degrees. For Weber,
the source of the concept in its application to social science, the
key to the concept is that the ideal-type itself is intelligible to a
greater extent than the messy raw material of disaggregated indi-
vidual action itself. One can speak of the medieval mind, to
choose one of his examples, in an ideal typical way by specifying
particular distinctive beliefs and motivations that represent the
vast and diverse morass of actual individual beliefs and motiva-
tions of the historical persons who lived in the Middle Ages (We-
ber, 2012, pp. 12829). The ideal-type is an idealization in the
sense that it is clearer and normally simpler than the disaggregated
historical reality of belief and motivation it represents. This greater
clarity is what makes it more understandable. This higher degree of
intelligibility is, so to speak, lent from the ideal-typical case to the
range of cases it is designed to typify. It thus contrasts to an aver-
age case: the ideal makes more sense than the cases it represents,
rather than representing them by abstracting common properties
of a class and producing a representative case by calculation.
The critique of the ideal-type was given its classical formulation
by Hempel (1963). Hempel denounced the concept as irretrievably
confused, and provided his own account of what would make it rel-
evant to scientic concept formation. He reinterpreted ideal-types
as intuitive idealizations (1963, pp. 227, 229) to distinguish them
from idealizations in physics (which he suggested, using the ideal
gas laws as a model, are ideal only in the sense that they involve
 S. Turner / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 532538
extreme values not to be found in real cases), and asked about the
circumstances that would have to obtain for these idealizations to
become explanatory. Hempels phrasing here amounts to an accep-
tance of the intelligibility-producing (or lending) character of
ideal-types presumably intuitions are intelligible. And this ts
with Webers own view of these same models. The difference is
over how they are tied to reality. For Hempel, they are treated as
sources of hypotheses which might be made into empirical theo-
ries: their function is to aid in the discovery of regular connec-
tions between various constituents of some social structure or
process. But treating ideal-types as true subject to ceteris paribus
clauses, he notes, will not sufce, because these qualications
make the formulation irrefutable and empirically irrelevant. Con-
sider the claim Q will be realized whenever P is realized all other
things being equal:
since the protective clause does not specify what factors other
than P have to be equal, (i.e. constant) or irrelevant if the predic-
tion is q is to be warranted, the hypothesis is not capable of pre-
dictive application to concrete phenomena. Similarly the idea of
testing the given hypothesis becomes pointless (Hempel, 1963,
p. 225).
The only thing that would make them explanatory would be for
them to function as theories, that is, for them to be claimed to be
predictive.
Hempels account puts economic theory, which he concedes to
be the conception in the social sciences that is closest to the natu-
ral sciences, into the category of irrefutable and thus empirically
irrelevant (1963, p. 224). Deducing results from postulates which
represent ideal forms of behavior precludes a theoretical basis for
an appraisal of the idealization involved (1963, p. 228). But he
thinks that economic theory can be saved if economic theory could
be deduced as a special case (1963, p. 226) from a more general
theory of social action, of the kind which, he optimistically noted,
was being proposed at the time (1963, p. 229). The effect of this
argument, as Hempel noted, is to collapse ideal-types into the cat-
egory of theory: Ideal constructs have the character not of con-
cepts in the narrower sense, but of theoretical systems (1963, p.
227). The theoretical systems are then understood in accordance
with the standard conception of empirical theory, and thus are
testable on the basis of predictions about observable phenomena,
because, as special cases, their area of application is dened
(1963, pp. 228229). Open ceteris paribus clauses mean that any
predictive failure can be claimed to be the result of external con-
ditions. This is an answer to the completion question: completion
occurs when there is a valid empirical theory.
But the issue of the intuitive part of an intuitive idealization
remains. Hempel is concerned with showing that intuitive ideal-
izations are problematic and inferior to the ideal gas laws, so he
does not tell us much about how the intuitive element works.
But if we acknowledge that the kind of theoretical derivation from
a general theory of human action he would prefer is not a viable
option, these inferior intuitive idealizations remain as alternatives.
In Webers account, to which Hempels discussion is addressed,
ideal-types are like causal models and mechanisms. They apply
where they apply. They are already understandable, by design:
they are created as a claried form of something we already under-
stand less than clearly. They are claried versions of the kinds of
understanding he describes as direct and indirect, or explanatory
understanding. We understand the ideal-type itself more clearly
than actions themselves, because the ideal-type is puried and
simplied, but clearer. We understand the things it applies to, such
5
G. E. M. Anscombe complained about these passages, which she regarded as a slip (1957, p. 5). But they were no slip at all: the idea of natural signs of intention pervades the
texts, as David Rubinstein has shown (2004).
537
as the rational actions of the market participant, indirectly through
the fact that it applies to the conduct of people in markets. The
intuitive part of the idealization comes from something we al-
ready understand, such as a rational choice. We can construct it
as an intuitive idealization, as an act of imagination, similar to
the acts of imagination involved in constructing a possible cause
to be tested as a possible confounder or common cause of a corre-
lation in a causal model. What does apply mean here, and what
sort of connection to individual action is at stake? Just as we might
conrm an imagined explanation of a persons action by subse-
quently encountering and directly understanding the person and
their action, we can construct an ideal-type, such as the ideal-type
Weber himself constructs of the person whose economic conduct
is motivated by the Protestant ethic, and indirectly understand
the pattern of meaningful conduct that we actually encounter in
terms of this ideal-type, by directly understanding elements of
their conduct that conform to the ideal-type. The same holds, of
course, for rational choice, though here the relation is more atten-
uated: proponents of rational choice analysis argue that the analy-
sis makes the actions intelligible, in the sense of rational, but claim
that the application is conrmed by the fact that it enables behav-
ior to be predicted. Nevertheless, there are, in this case as well, di-
rect understandings to which these abstractions attach. Buying
vegetables in a market is making a directly understood act, and if
these and similar acts were not already understandable as rational
choices, we would not know why the model applied here.
4. Is there such a thing as direct understanding?
The Achilles heel of this account is the notion of direct under-
standing itself. I can only note that this is not an idea that is limited
to Weber. Indeed, it is ubiquitous, and even central, to very differ-
ent philosophical traditions. Wittgenstein, for example, speaks of
the natural expression of an intention (1958, p. 165, para 647)
as part of natural history.5 Peter Winch quotes Rush Rhees to the ef-
fect that we see that we understand one another, without noticing
whether our reactions tally or not. Because we agree in our reactions,
it is possible for me to tell you something, and it is possible for you to
teach me something (Winch, 1990, p. 85). Though Rhees does not
say it, the reactions are natural signs, which are, in Webers terms,
directly understood. And there is a question, implicit in Rhees phras-
ing, of how one could acquire a concept without this kind of direct
understanding. If we consider the meaning producing device that
was central to Quine, ostensive denition, we come to the same re-
sult: what makes ostensive denition possible is the fact that I can
see that your act of sticking your nger in the direction of an object
is an act of pointing, and that I can empathize with your picking out
the thing being pointed to as an object, and naming it. These descrip-
tions are a dead-end. No additional causes or explanations are
needed or for that matter possible.
The discussion of this problem has recently been altered by the
discovery of mirror neurons, which operate by preconsciously acti-
vating the neurons used in performing an action when an action is
seen to be performed by others. This is preconceptual, and seems
also to be the basis of empathy and the recognition of intentional-
ity in action (cf. Hurley & Chater, 2005; Iacoboni, 2009; Turner,
2011a, 2011b). If we are to take the idea of direct understanding
seriously, the distinction between the social sciences and the natu-
ral sciences with respect to where explanation ends comes down to
this: explanation in the natural sciences can end with an under-
stood model. In the social sciences, to the extent that models are
concerned with conduct that is subject to direct understanding,
538 S. Turner / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44 (2013) 532538
there will always be an additional question: does the model t with
our direct understanding of the conduct which is being modeled?
The question does not itself imply a general claim that tting with
our direct understanding is a requirement for accepting the model:
it may be that our direct understanding needs to be set aside for
purposes of predictive accuracy, simplicity, or any of a number of
other goals, as with science and perception generally. It may also
be that the intellectual operations that employ the results of neuron
mirroring, such as simulation, operate under cognitive limitations,
such as the illusion of conscious will (Wegner, 2002), limitations
which are reproduced in our understanding of others. But the fact
that models in the social sciences are subject to the problem of
application, the fact that they apply when they apply, and not
universally, means that social science connects to its subject matter
in a different way. The need for background knowledge involving
intentions and beliefs, the need to explain why a model applies or
fails to apply to a particular case of conduct, and the role of inten-
tional elements in mechanisms, as well as the question of
whether a particular description of an action ts, all require that
models attach at some point to direct understanding.
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