The positivistic approach to understanding human action: part two

Carrying on straight from the last post, despite Weber’s positivist assertion that beliefs and desires are the causal agents for human action, he also recognized that unlike other causes, the beliefs and desires that a human has can also be the reason for their actions. The term ‘reason’ refers to the individual’s own justification and rationality behind their action – how they think it is appropriate, reasonable, efficient, and the correct action to perform. By this definition one could say that they attempt to make their actions intelligible. However, the positivistic view has some serious drawbacks on the issue of investigating human action, specifically because they only believe that empirical data (information we can retrieve with our senses) is the only type of data that can really be considered scientific. Take the following example, for instance: winking your eye at someone, compared to blinking while you happened to walk past them.

Therefore, the positivistic view could and would only be interested in looking at the physical behaviour of the individual, and there is not too much physiological difference between a wink and blink. The same physiological effects occur: muscles contract and expand, neurons fire, chemical processes are produced, etcetera. However, we as human beings, the agents of actions, know that there is a difference between a wink and a blink: the difference is that a blink is a behaviour that we do without thinking about it, there is no belief or reason behind our blink other than a purely physiological one. A wink has meaning behind it, or perhaps a better way of saying it is that the individual in our example would wink with intent.

Now, following from this example, suppose a woman who thought that a man was winking at her made her feel that he was sexually harassing her; therefore, she decided to sue him: a judge or jury following the positivistic approach would find no physiological, empirical difference between the act of a wink or a blink; thus they would view the intent (i.e. beliefs, reasons) behind the action (the muscles contracting and expanding to make the eyelid close and open) as something not worth scientifically considering.

In order to understand why positivists take this stance, it is important to realize that the positivistic approach and its practitioners are characterised as believing in the deductive-nomological explanation. A very brief definition of what this deductive-nomological explanation entails is that it is a scientific explanation which is a deductive argument, and that it has at least one ‘natural’ law in it. A natural law is something that happens whether or not we know of its existence, such as a metal expands when it is heated. Even if we did not realise or have the belief that metal expanded when exposed to a certain temperature, it still would expand when subjected to that temperature.

Furthermore, it is this type of law that positivists want to associate to human beings and their actions, and it is one of the main points of criticism of this approach. However, in the social sciences, there has been a dispute ranging since the end of the 19th century of the suitability of this positivist, deterministic mode of explanation for the investigation of human action. Thus, we move on to the more socially orientated approaches to human action paper and discuss how these critiques have led to more a socially orientated approach on how one may investigate the phenomenon of human action which will be discussed in the next series of posts.