Wilhelm Dilthey Forerunner of Humanist Social Thought

HUMANIST sociology is as a meadow in the forest of positivist science. Much of this space was cleared by Wilhelm Dilthey, not only through his attack on the fundamental assumptions of positivism, but also through his formulation of a critical method by which the works of free human consciousness could be understood. The first tenet of positivsm is that the world is made up of "out there" objectively knowable "facts." Dilthey undercut this notion by asserting that the subject matter of the human studies was not mere "facts" of nature, but rather objectified expressions and the human mind. The second central assumption of positivism is that these "facts" are explainable or determined by general casual laws. In contrast, Dilthey asserted that, while we can explain the natural world, human action must be understood through an interpretive rather than a casual logic. In demonstrating and specifically describing such an interpretive procedure, Dilthey provided an epistemological and methodological grounding for a humanistic science of man.