Is Popper Still Relevant to Social Science? Three Worlds Updated

Karl Popper’s relation to social science is complex. The focus of his philosophy of science was general theories. His discussions of social science reflected the still-powerful influence of mechanistic Marxism. These writings and the Popper-Kuhn disputes of the 1960s led to a variety of responses by social science, including attacks by the Frankfurt School and Jürgen Habermas, by science studies, an embrace by rational choice theorists and critics of positivism, and cognitive archaeology. Social science had largely turned away from such theories to statistical modelling, rational choice, “critique” in a sense alien to Popper, so his relevance to actual social science became less clear. But there are some important aspects of Popper’s thought that remain relevant and point to the future of social science. His approach to the logic of the situation in The Poverty of Historicism ([1957]1961) is a useful corrective to the situation-free application of rational choice models. But even more, his late controversial works on “world 3” point to alternative ways of thinking of the things problematically thought of as socially constructed or as a matter of subjective belief. Suitably revised, they fit with recent cognitive science approaches to the extended mind and point to a coherent vision of social science.