Former student of the École Normale Supérieure, Jean Michel Berthelot began his career as a teacher of philosophy in secondary education.
Berthelot's philosophy and history of social sciences was influenced by Kant, French historical epistemology of Bachelard, Canguilhem, Koyré and Gaston Granger, the falsifiability of Popper and Lakatos and the epistemological reflections of sociologists, from Durkheim, Weber and Simmel to Passeron, Adorno and Habermas.
Berthelot created a typology of sociological explanations, constituted by six logical schemas of intelligibility: causal, actancial, hermeneutic, structural, functionalist and dialectic.
Berthelot, at the same time, criticized the epistemic relativism and defended the pluralism and openness in sociology, which makes him, in the contemporary debate on philosophy of social sciences, a rationalist and constructivist.
The pluralism in sociology, in Berthelot's epistemology, is not only inevitably, but even fruitful for the research and theoretical debate.