Karl Popper and the Social Sciences

REALISM, WORLD 3, AND SOCIAL INQUIRY

criteria for realness; therefore, atoms are real (SIB, 9). Moreover, while Popper acknowledges that, probably owing to our early childhood experiences, material objects form the “paradigm of reality” for us, nonetheless we should not concede that “material things are in any sense ‘ultimate’”(ibid.). Material things, modern physics has taught us, may in certain cases be “interpreted as very special physical processes”(ibid.). But I should stress here that, for Popper, in claiming that certain theoretical entities, such as atoms or neutrinos, are real, we make no claim to have described those entities completely. Popper held that good scientific theories get closer to the truth (they have greater “verisimilitude”), but no theory ever produces an ultimate explanation—that is, an explanation whose truth would be somehow intuitively obvious and in no need of further refinement (OK, 194–195). Popper rejected such “essentialism” (ibid.). Science, he said, does “probe deeper and deeper into the structure of the world,” but there can be no end to science; rather, the task of science continually renews itself (OK, 196). We can always seek a deeper, “more essential” explanation of the phenomena described by any given theory (ibid.). And, because verifying—as opposed to falsifying—a theory is impossible, even if we did produce a complete, exhaustive , irreducible account of some phenomena, we would have no way of knowing that the theory was in fact perfect and final. A theoretical entity such as the atom might one day be superseded by a theory with a richer, deeper account of the microscopic world. Nonetheless, the older atomic theory has, however imperfectly, described reality and that description accounts for the predictive power atomic theory has so far produced. REALISM, WORLD 3, AND SO CIAL I NQ UI RY What relevance does Popper’s realism have for social inquiry? This is a question of some importance, although it has scarcely been explored in the literature on Popper. This is unfortunate because a full understanding of Popper’s ideas on social science, including situational analysis, requires an understanding of his realism. In particular, to fully understand the connection between Popper’s realism and his understanding of social science, we need to consider Popper’s theory of the three worlds. This was Popper’s highly original contribution to ontology, which he began to develop in the 1960s in such essays as “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject” and “On the Theory of Objective Mind”(OK, 106–190). He further developed this pluralist ontology in The Self and Its Brain, an inquiry into the mind-body problem published in 1977. A brief account of Popper’s theory is needed before we explore its relevance to social inquiry. Popper claimed that the world could be divided into “at least three ontological distinct sub-worlds,” which he called Worlds 1, 2, and 3 (OK, 154). Worlds 1 and 2 correspond respectively to body and mind in the traditional mind-body dualism.That is,World 1 represents the material world, and World 32 KARL POPPER AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 2 is the realm of subjective mental states. Like other advocates of mind-body dualism, Popper held that World 2 was an irreducible, nonmaterial, and autonomous realm. However, Popper was not a mind-body dualist—he was an ontological pluralist. He held that there was a third ontological realm beyond the material world and the world of subjective experience. This was Popper’s World 3, which he described variously as “the world of objective contents of thought,” “the world of the products of the human mind,” and “the world of intelligibles, or ideas in the objective sense” (OK, 107, 155; SIB, 38; Popper’s italics ). This world, according to Popper, includes “stories, explanatory myths, tools, scientific theories (whether true or false), scientific problems, social institutions , and works of art”(SIB, 38.). In positing World 3, Popper placed himself in the company of another ontological pluralist, Plato. Specifically (as Popper himself emphasized), World 3 in some ways resembles Plato’s Forms. Like the Forms, World 3 objects are real and autonomous entities that play a central role in human cognition. Plato thought people were born with an intellectual intuition that allowed them, however dimly, to “see” the Forms, and that they used this faculty in making intellectual judgments. Indeed, philosophy could be described as the task of learning to see the Forms better. Similarly, Popper said that people think largely by “grasping” World 3 entities, as when they try to solve a problem by contemplating a scientific...