Q.What is special or different about the kind of objectivity needed in social science?

Social science studies subjective human meaning, so it needs a harder kind of objectivity than natural science -- one that combines empathetic understanding of others' values with disciplined value neutrality about them. …

The objectivity social science needs is different from, and in some ways harder to achieve than, the objectivity natural science needs, because of what each discipline actually studies. The natural sciences study the physical world, which has no subjective meanings of its own to interpret -- a rock or a chemical reaction does not attach meaning to what it does, so natural science can be objective simply by carefully observing external, non-subjective phenomena. Social science, in Weber's view, studies social action -- human behaviour to which the actor attaches meaning -- and meaning is inherently subjective, differing from person to person and situation to situation. This means the social scientist cannot simply observe behaviour from the outside the way a natural scientist observes physical events; they must instead practise 'empathetic understanding', imaginatively putting themselves in the actor's place to grasp the meaning that actor gives to their own action -- what Weber called 'feeling with' rather than merely 'feeling for' someone. But this immediately creates a risk: if the sociologist has to engage empathetically with someone else's subjective values and beliefs, it becomes easy for the sociologist's own personal opinions about those values to distort the resulting account. Weber's answer to this risk is 'value neutrality': the sociologist must record another person's values and meanings faithfully and accurately, without letting personal judgement about whether those values are right or wrong creep into the description -- describing rather than judging. This is what makes social-scientific objectivity distinctive: rather than simply excluding subjective material the way natu …