[1] The term is closely associated with the work of the German sociologist Max Weber, whose antipositivism established an alternative to prior sociological positivism and economic determinism, rooted in the analysis of social action.
It also implies that unlike objects in the natural world human actors are not simply the product of the pulls and pushes of external forces.
[5][6][7][8] The concept of Verstehen was later used by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey[9][10] to describe the first-person participatory perspective that agents have on their individual experience as well as their culture, history, and society.
In this sense, it is developed in the context of the theory and practice of interpretation (as understood in the context of hermeneutics) and contrasted with the external objectivating third-person perspective of explanation (das Erklären) in which human agency, subjectivity, and its products are analyzed as effects of impersonal natural forces in the natural sciences and social structures in sociology.
Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel further transformed the concept of Verstehen, reformulating it on the basis of a transcendental-pragmatic philosophy of language and the theory of communicative action.
In sociology it is an aspect of the comparative-historical approach, where the context of a society like twelfth century "France" can be potentially better understood (besserverstehen) by the sociologist than it could have been by people living in a village in Burgundy.
[16] Weber had more specific beliefs than Marx where he put value to understanding and meaning of key elements—not just with intuition or sympathy with the individual but also the product of "systematic and rigorous research".
[citation needed] Just as in physical science all knowledge is asymptotic to the full explanation, a high degree of cross-cultural understanding is very valuable.