For over a century now there has been a continuing debate about whether the forms of explanation appropriate to the social sciences are essentially the same as or radically different from those used in the natural sciences. On one side is the empiricist philosophical tradition, ranging at least from John Stuart Mill through the logical positivists. According to this view, the covering law model of explanation appropriate for the natural sciences is equally appropriate for subjects such as history, anthropology, linguistics, economics, and other social sciences.Onthe other side is the interpretivist or hermeneutic tradition which ranges at least from Dilthey in the nineteenth century through the twentieth-century followers of Wittgenstein. According to this tradition, there are special modes of explanation appropriate to human behavior. In the second tradition, for example, Dilthey claims that a special method which he calls Verstehen (literally, understanding) is essential to the social sciences. And more recently, Charles Taylor (1985) claimed that human beings are unique in that events are meaningful to them in a special way and that any mode of explanation adequate to accounting for human behavior must explain this meaning component.

An unstated but underlying feature of this debate is often the assumption that much larger issues are at stake. There is at least the suggestion that the issue is a version of the dispute between materialism, on one hand, and dualism and idealism, on the other.