In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Notes I NT ROD UCT ION 1. The Chinese students’embrace of Popper was conveyed to me in private conversation by Xiao Sun, a Chinese doctoral student in sociology at Princeton University. Like many others before them, the Chinese students probably misread Popper’s critique of Marxism. In chapter 5 I will argue that Popper did not necessarily view Marxism as unscientific. 2. An abbreviated version of the Harvard address, entitled “La rationalité et le statut du principe de rationalité,”was published in an edited French volume, Les Fondements Philosophique des Systèmes Économiques, edited by Emil M. Classen. That essay was later published in English in Popper Selections, edited by David Miller, which appeared in 1985. The full address was not published until 1994, when it appeared in The Myth of Framework, edited by M. A. Notturno. CHAP T ER ONE 1. In fact, Popper claimed that he could trace the genesis of his theory that falsifiability demarcates science from nonscience to his more or less simultaneous encounter with Marxism and Einstein’s theory of gravity in his youth (UQ, 113). Hacohen (2000), however, casts doubt on Popper’s claim, arguing that Popper’s ideas on falsification and the demarcation between science and nonscience developed gradually in the 1920s and early ’30s. We will consider Popper’s falsificationism and his complex attitude toward Marx in, respectively, chapters 3 and 5. 2. In chapter 4 I will argue that laws play no real role in Popperian social science. 3. I say “almost” because Popper contended that the theory of evolution could be described as an instance of situational logic (UQ, 167–169), although Popper’s reasons for claiming this are not entirely clear to me. Popper accepted the evolution of species on earth as fact, but nonetheless maintained that the theory of evolution was best described as a metaphysical research program rather than a scientific theory. This is because he viewed evolutionary theory as nonfalsifiable and almost tautological. What evolutionary theory really says, according to Popper, is that if you have entities that produce copies of themselves with a degree of variability and the situation is such that some of those entities will prove better able to survive in a given environment (and thus produce more copies of themselves), then, over time, entities will emerge that are better adapted to the environment. But the prediction that better-adapted entities will emerge is implied by the premises of variable reproduction and selective pressures; it is thus tautological and 123 therefore necessarily rather than contingently true. In other words, Popper says, evolution is guaranteed by the logic of situation. This description bears some resemblance to Popper ’s situational analysis (discussed in this chapter), in which agents, animated by the “rationality principle,” act out what is already implicit in a particular situation. Because what counts as rational is, as it were, built in to the situation, predictions regarding the agent’s behavior are tautological. As far as I know, this is the only instance of situational analysis outside of social science described by Popper. As regards the persuasiveness of Popper’s account of evolutionary theory, I will only comment that, while Darwinian theory may not be able to produce nontautological predictions regarding the future development of organisms, it seems to me that it has been remarkably successful in making surprising and novel retrodictions concerning past events in evolutionary history. Chief among these is the prediction of the existence of extinct intermediary species between related species. Had no such intermediary species been uncovered, evolutionary theory would have been falsified—or, at least, an auxiliary hypothesis would have been required to save the theory. Of course, this does not vitiate Popper’s argument that the general proposition that things evolve given the proper circumstances is a nearly empty claim.But I think it does show that the theory of evolution has produced bold and falsifiable (and strongly corroborated) retrodictions and thus deserves to be called a scientific theory. 4. The reasons for the absence of lawlike regularities in the social realm will be explored in chapter 4. 5. However, Popper more frequently cites tracing the unintended consequences of human actions as the chief goal of social science (MF, 74, 128; OSE II, 95). A full statement of Popper’s understanding of the goal of social inquiry could, I believe, be stated as follows: The primary aim of social science is to unveil and explain the unintended repercussions of human action.This will always require development...

Share