title: [Thought Experiments in Historiographic Function: Max Weber on Eduard Meyer and the Question of Counterfactuality].
abstract: Thought Experiments in Historiographic Function: Max Weber on Eduard Meyer and the Question of Counterfactuality. Max Weber's remarks on his colleague Eduard Meyer regarding counterfactual reasoning in history reflects a significant shift during the Methodenstreit around 1900. The question of attributing historical change strictly to either individual causes or abstract general laws has been tackled in a new way: By counterfactual reasoning a historian should be able to detect the most significant (and therefore meaningful) cause, event, or action for a certain historical outcome. Following Fritz Ringer, this paper argues that given the predominating methods of the natural sciences, scholars of the humanities conducted historical research by counterfactual thought experiments. This way, Weber pried open contemporary narratives (e.g. historicism), and by employing a unique historical causal analysis he made way for refined concepts to offer a model of interpretation that gave hope for a more feasible, practice-oriented approach to historical research than the epistemological discussions had hitherto offered.
authors.affiliation: M. A., Universität Konstanz, Fachbereich Geschichte und Soziologie, Universitätsstraße 10, D-78464 Konstanz. florian.ernst@uni-konstanz.de.
authors.forename: Florian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ernst
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension; D005858:Germany; D006663:Historiography; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D010684:Philosophy / Q000266:history*; D012106:Research / Q000266:history*; D012961:Sociology / Q000266:history*; D013850:Thinking
keywords: Abstraktion; Adäquate Verursachung; Erklären-Verstehen; Gedankenexperiment; Methodenstreit; Meyer, Eduard; Objektive Möglichkeit; Praxis; Signifikanz; Weber, Max; abstraction; adequate causation; explanation-understanding (Erklären-Verstehen); objective possibility; practice; significance; thought experiment