<P> The variety of positivism that remains dominant today is termed instrumental positivism . This approach eschews epistemological and metaphysical concerns (such as the nature of social facts) in favour of methodological clarity, replicability, reliability and validity . This positivism is more or less synonymous with quantitative research, and so only resembles older positivism in practice . Since it carries no explicit philosophical commitment, its practitioners may not belong to any particular school of thought . Modern sociology of this type is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld, who pioneered large - scale survey studies and developed statistical techniques for analysing them . This approach lends itself to what Robert K. Merton called middle - range theory: abstract statements that generalize from segregated hypotheses and empirical regularities rather than starting with an abstract idea of a social whole . </P> <P> Reactions against social empiricism began when German philosopher Hegel voiced opposition to both empiricism, which he rejected as uncritical, and determinism, which he viewed as overly mechanistic . Karl Marx's methodology borrowed from Hegelian dialecticism but also a rejection of positivism in favour of critical analysis, seeking to supplement the empirical acquisition of "facts" with the elimination of illusions . He maintained that appearances need to be critiqued rather than simply documented . Early hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the distinction between natural and social science (' Geisteswissenschaft'). Various neo-Kantian philosophers, phenomenologists and human scientists further theorized how the analysis of the social world differs to that of the natural world due to the irreducibly complex aspects of human society, culture, and being . </P> <P> At the turn of the 20th century the first generation of German sociologists formally introduced methodological anti-positivism, proposing that research should concentrate on human cultural norms, values, symbols, and social processes viewed from a resolutely subjective perspective . Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a science as it is able to identify causal relationships of human "social action"--especially among "ideal types", or hypothetical simplifications of complex social phenomena . As a non-positivist, however, Weber sought relationships that are not as "historical, invariant, or generalisable" as those pursued by natural scientists . Fellow German sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, theorized on two crucial abstract concepts with his work on "Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft" (lit . community and society). Tönnies marked a sharp line between the realm of concepts and the reality of social action: the first must be treated axiomatically and in a deductive way ("pure sociology"), whereas the second empirically and inductively ("applied sociology"). </P> <P> (Sociology is)... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces . By' action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful...the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract . In neither case is the' meaning' to be thought of as somehow objectively' correct' or' true' by some metaphysical criterion . This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of prior discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject - matter' correct' or' valid' meaning . </P>

Who introduced the cocept of ideal type in sociology