HISTORICAL EXPLANATION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

THE hope which originally inspired methodology was the hope of finding a method of enquiry which would be both necessary and sufficient to guide the scientist unerringly to truth. This hope has died a natural death. Today, methodology has the more modest task of establishing certain rules and requirements which are necessary to prohibit some wrong-headed moves but insufficient to guarantee success. These rules and requirements, which circumscribe scientific enquiries without steering them in any specific direction, are of the two main kinds, formal and material. So far as I can see, the formal rules of scientific method (which comprise both logical rules and certain realistic and fruitful stipulations) are equally applicable to all the empirical sciences. You cannot, for example, deduce a universal law from a finite number of observations whether you are a physicist, a biologist, or an anthropologist. Again, a single comprehensive explanation of a whole range of phenomena is preferable to isolated explanations of each of those phenomena, whatever your field of enquiry. I shall therefore confine myself to the more disputable (I had nearly said ' more disreputable') and metaphysically impregnated part of methodology which tries to establish the appropriate material requirements which the contents of the premisses of an explanatory theory in a particular field ought to satisfy. These requirements may be called regulative principles. Fundamental differences in the subjectmatters of different sciences-differences to which formal methodolo