Karl Popper and the Social Sciences

Conclusion

Conclusion I hope the reader is convinced that Popper’s views on social science not only provide insight into the nature of social inquiry but also offer needed direction for the practice of social science. For some time now, social scientists have been mired in self-doubt about their discipline. Indeed, the failure of efforts to model social inquiry on a particular—and often deeply flawed— understanding of natural science has threatened the very existence of social science as an academic discipline. The enthusiasm of the post-World War II behaviorist movement has long since waned, the approach having borne little fruit. The search for general laws or universal theories of social life has come up empty, and the capacity to predict human behavior and social events is meager if not nonexistent. Unfortunately, in general the failure of this approach has not led to a reconsideration of social science method but rather to an emphasis on technical refinement of methods. Such refinements would be welcome if they had discernible benefits in actual social science explanations, but this has not been the case. Instead of fostering better understanding of the social world, social science has become increasingly untethered to reality and thus socially irrelevant. The more recent rational choice movement has not fared better, at least outside the realm of economics. While rational choice theories are often elegant, they typically bear at best only passing resemblance to the real social world. Worse, rational choice practitioners tend to train their efforts on phenomena that appear to be amenable to the approach rather than directing their research toward problems of social importance . This, too, has led to social inquiry that is increasingly irrelevant to the pressing problems of social life. This unhappy state has led many social scientists to reject any attempts to model the social sciences on the natural sciences and to propose abandoning the search for general explanation altogether. All that social science may provide, according to some, is “thick” descriptions of social phenomena or idiographic accounts of social events. While interpretive or hermeneutic approaches clearly have their place in social inquiry, the claim that there is 121 no room for causal explanation or general theories in social science is, I think, too pessimistic. The absence of general laws, universal theories, and precise predictive capabilities in the social sciences does not mean that general explanations in the social sciences are impossible. In fact, as I hope to have shown the reader, the construction of social models that offer some general explanatory power is within the reach of social science. Popper’s situational models offer one approach that weds interpretation to explanation. Insofar as situational analysis requires a rich account of the institutions, beliefs, norms, traditions , and habits that inform human action, it mirrors the interpretive approach. And indeed Popper’s method may be employed to explain particular social events. But it may also be used to enhance our understanding of typical social phenomena and institutions—for example, revolutions, trade cycles, and elections; bureaucracies, political parties, and universities—by revealing how the intricate interaction of actors may produce certain typical phenomena , especially unintended consequences. We will never be able to predict with any confidence and precision when a revolution will occur or which party will win an election or when an economic recession will set in. But we can say something about the general features of such events all the same. We can make sense of them in hindsight by showing how they are the result of individuals responding rationally to their situation— or, at least, responding in irrational but nonetheless understandable ways. Although this is not the goal that many social scientists have sought, it does offer a genuine and intellectually satisfying kind of explanation that can increase our understanding of the social world. 122 KARL POPPER AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES ...