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The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 47
therefore induced to move beyond the initial antithetic theses, and this presup-
poses a continual refining of the forms of causality employed.
11. This brings us to the central problem of the laws and causes, or of fore-
casting and explanation. As we know, positivism has constantly insisted that
science should be compelled to confine its attention to the discovery of laws or
to forecasting based on laws and to refrain from seeking for causes or ‘modes of
production’ of phenomena. It is strange that this restriction should have been
made by Comte, who, rightly or wrongly, was convinced of the utilitarian
nature of science - the more so since, although forecasting is useful to human
activity, the latter is concerned primarily with producing rather than with
reproducing, while for both these purposes the ‘mode of production’ is far
more important than is forecasting.
Specialists in the different branches of the natural sciences frequently call
themselves positivists, and make some statement to that effect in their prefaces,
as if science were merely a matter of establishing and generalizing about laws
and deducing from them certain predictions which can be verified by experi-
mentation. But as E. Meyerson has ceaselessly pointed out, when we move on
from the preface to the body of the work we find a very different state of affairs,
for no scientific thinker worthy of the name discusses laws and functions without
seeking the reason for them, without trying to isolate ‘factors’ and without
introducing explanatory hypotheses as constituting basic ideas in research
work. One of the best-known examples of the futility of prohibitions is to be
found in atomic research, the hypotheses underlying which was severely cen-
sured by certain positivists while it was no more than an explanatory postulate;
but we all know what atomic science has since achieved. It is true that if the
atomic phenomenon is a causal model for phenomena at a higher level than
itself, we find only laws, and not immediatecauses, when we study the atom. But
the laws in turn require an explanation, and so on.
The refusal to search for causes or for the mode of production of phenomena
has undoubtedly had less repercussions in the human sciences, firstly because
they are newer and more modest disciplines (and because the trends claiming
to be ‘positivist’ differ from each other still more than in other branches) but
also - indeed primarily - because the prime function of man is to act and to
produce, and not merely to contemplate and to forecast; so that while the need
to understand and to explain is no more marked in the psychological and social
sciences than in others (actually, it is constant in all sciences), it is possibly more
explicit and more conscious. It is true that, following upon Dilthey’s reflexions
and Jaspers’s psycho-pathology, some schools of thought are inclined to distinguish
between ‘explanation’, which, they say, is material and causal in nature,
and ‘understanding’, which, in their view, is concerned with conscious meanings
and intentions. This, however, merely complicates the problem (see below
under m). No one is thinking of questioning the need for explanation, and the
very concept of ‘causality’ is coming back into fashion in sociology as a result
of the studies of ‘multivariate analysis’,
But in what does explanation consist? In the sciences of man as in the natural