Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Historians create narratives that explain why events occurred
as they did. Of course, there are better and worse historical
accounts, but there is no single account that completely
explains reality. Reality is multifaceted; thus, we need to
look at its complex happenings using a number of ideological
tools—different lenses—to gain insight into its range of
interrelated elements.
These tools are what Weber called ideal types.
In his allegory of the cave in , Plato asserted that
because they can be changed, material objects are not real.
What is real are the forms, idealized essences of things that we
see not with our eyes but with the eye of the mind. We reach
truth through philosophical contemplation, not observation.
What is real is what is perfect; we can use the imperfect to start
thinking about what is real, but the observable is not really it.
We need to transcend the material to get truth.
For Weber, the material world is the real world. Where Plato
argues that we use our acquaintance with the material to get to
the real truth in the ideal or perfect realm, Weber argues that
the perfect is never real, but we need to use it to get to what is
real: our messy, complicated material world.
According to Weber, the world is so complex that the only way
to make sense of it is to oversimplify, to cut out real elements
through the use of ideal types, which are uncluttered and neat
concepts that we look for in the workings of society.
One example of an ideal type is the notion of economic man
used in classical economics. Human beings are, for the sake
of the theory, considered to be perfectly rational and perfectly
self-interested. Of course, no one believes this is true, but by
version of transactions, where the observed effects are
approximated by the idealized ones.
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