Can Human Action Be Studied Like Physics?

THE METHODENSTREIT

The nineteenth-century Methodenstreit was not simply a quarrel between deduction and data. It concerned the proper object and method of the social sciences: whether economic order should be explained through general theory of purposeful action, reconstructed through historical institutions, or discovered through empirical regularities.

That disagreement never disappeared. It migrated into model selection, causal inference, econometrics, behavioral science, and now machine learning.

Sponte returns to the dispute for a precise reason: a method can be technically excellent while being mismatched to the kind of thing it is asked to know.