Abstract
We explicate Popper's methodological individualism (MI), taking into consideration his philosophy as a whole and its development. His MI cannot be reduced to individual psychology and/or methodological holism and must be understood from the viewpoint of his metaphysical three-worlds-theory. We particularly emphasize the importance of situational analysis centering on the rationality principle. Concerning this principle there are some misunderstandings, mainly among economists, which can be removed by showing the logic of situational analysis. We demonstrate the applicability and fruitfulness of MI and situational analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Hans-Joachim Niemann (2004) denies the reduction of sociological laws to psychology.
- 2.
See also Di Iorio’s (2016) commentaries on Popper’s MI.
- 3.
Although the ‘logic of the situation’ or the ‘situational analysis’ are used almost interchangeably in Popper’s writings, we will follow Popper (1994a) and give preference to the latter.
- 4.
In general, Popper’s thought was enlarged in the 1960s, from scientific methodology to metaphysics, and from physics to biology, the theory of evolution and probability theory. As will be discussed in Sect. 3, the impetus for the expansion was The Post-Script to the Logic of Scientific Discovery (1982a, 1982b, 1983a), which was written between 1951 and 1956. It should be remarked that two articles, ‘The Rationality Principle’ (1967) and ‘Models, Instruments, and Truth’ (1994a), which represent Popper’s later methodology of the social sciences, are also significantly different from The Poverty of Historicism (1944–45, 1957) and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945 [1966]), written during his exile in New Zealand.
- 5.
In the philosophy of science, methodology is often regarded as the theory of testing methods. At the same time, MI is generally interpreted as a method of explaining social phenomena. If, as Popper (1972, Appendix I) says, testing is another aspect of explanation in terms of the philosophy of science, then the terms MI and methodology should to some extent be regarded as synonymous and will be treated as such in this chapter.
- 6.
Popper distinguishes four positions in materialism. Of these positions, radical materialism does not accept the existence of mental processes, whereas the rests do. However, what all four positions have in common is that none of them acknowledge the interaction between Worlds 1 and 2 and consider World 1, i.e., the physical world, to be self-contained and closed in its own right. It is against this background that panpsychism, epiphenomenalism, and identity theory are also categorized as materialism.
- 7.
The interaction between Worlds 3 and 2 is discussed in detail by Eccles, co-author of The Self and Its Brain. According to Eccles and Robinson (1984), a person is considered to be a human being even at the fetal stage, but the process of personality development, in which a person acquires self-consciousness as a single personality, can be described as precisely the process of interaction between Worlds 2 and 3. They illustrate the process by which each individual consciousness (World 2) interacts with language-based culture (World 3) such as science, literature and art, expanding and elevating each together (Eccles and Robinson 1984, p. 31, see Fig. 3-4). It then states that. “And so each of us has developed progressively in self-creation, and this can go on throughout our whole lifetime. The more the World 3 resources of the human person, the more does it gain in the self-consciousness of World 2 by reciprocal enrichment. What we are is dependent on the World 3 that we have been immersed in and how effectively we have utilized our opportunities to make the most of our brain potentialities” (Eccles and Robinson 1984, p. 32). Furthermore, immediately after this sentence, they refer to the tragic case of Genie, a young girl whose personality development stopped after she was cut off from contact with World 3 for more than a decade (Eccles and Robinson 1984, p. 32). This is a vivid impression of the reality of World 3 and its influence on World 2, and may serve as a corollary to show how important it is to understand the interaction between Worlds 3 and 2 in order to understand the mind.
- 8.
Popper describes reductionism as follows. “As a research programme, reductionalism is not only important, but it is part of the programme of science whose aim is to explain and to understand” (Popper and Eccles 1977, p. 18, italics in original). The biologist Medawar also stated that “Reductive analysis is the most successful research stratagem ever devised: it has been the making of science and technology” (Medawar and Medawar 1983, p. 227).
- 9.
- 10.
Kim (1999), while relying on the hypothesis of causal closure of the physical domain, questions downward causality (action from Worlds 2 to 1). In contemporary philosophy of mind, the physicalist view of the human mind, such as Kim's, is more dominant, while those who defend the pluralistic interaction theory, such as Popper, belong to rather a minority group. Popper himself criticizes closedness and self-containment in The Self and Its Brain (Popper and Eccles 1977, chapter P3). The questions raised by physicalists seem to be based on mere ontological hypotheses, but surely they suggest a cluster of arguments in defense of Popper's three-world-theory.
- 11.
The institutions that Popper refers to are, so to speak, ‘entities without a knowing subject’, and cannot be reduced to World 2, such as collective consciousness. Social institutions are precisely what Hayek calls ‘the results of human action but not of human design’ (Hayek 1967), which is something completely different from what methodological holism assumes.
- 12.
Nevertheless, a plastically controlled world is neither completely random nor chaotic, where what is to come is completely unpredictable. As mentioned above, we can find there a certain degree of order and stability in our society, created by norms and institutions. In his article “Of Clouds and Clocks” (1966), Popper makes use of the metaphors ‘clouds’, representing utter randomness, and ‘clocks’, representing deterministic phenomena, to argue that many of the physical events in our world (clocks, animals, plants, puppies, clusters of small flies, solar systems, etc.) are neither ‘clocks’ nor ‘clouds’, but are rather there between them. He argues that the world is positioned somewhere between probability 1 (clock) and 0 (cloud). There is little mention of social events in his article, but given their nature, they would likewise be placed somewhere in between 1 and 0.
- 13.
- 14.
Simkin, born in New Zealand, was an economist, colleague and lifelong friend of Popper’s who he met while at Canterbury University College in Christchurch, where he was posted from March 1937 (Popper 1974, p. 89). In his acknowledgements to The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper expresses his gratitude to Simkin stating “Professor C. G. F. Simkin has not only helped me with an earlier version, but has given me the opportunity of clarifying many problems in detailed discussions over a period of nearly four years” (Popper 1945 [1966], p. xxix). For more information on Simkin, see Hacohen (2000) and Hogan (1999).
- 15.
In support of his argument, Popper shows that there are sociological laws which state as follows: “You cannot introduce agricultural tariffs and at the same time reduce the cost of living”. “You cannot, in an industrial society, organize consumers’ pressure groups as efficiently as you can organize certain producers’ pressure groups”. “You cannot have a centrally planned society with a price system that fulfills the main functions of competitive prices”. “You cannot have full employment without inflation” (Popper 1957, p. 62).
- 16.
Deterministic explanations and predictions may be possible under the conditions that the effects from surplus variables can be completely controlled, as in the two-body problem in the solar system or in laboratory experiments in the natural sciences. However, it would not be easy to create such ideal experimental conditions in the social sciences.
- 17.
It is possible to say that Popper’s construction of the situational model and Hayek’s explanation of the principle seem to be almost identical in terms of explaining phenomena. Hayek (1955) takes up the construction of the model in the context of examining the explanation of the principle. Although we cannot here take Hayek’s view into consideration, we think that Popper was influenced by Hayek and came to share his view.
- 18.
It would be more accurate to say that pedestrian crossings and traffic signals belong to Worlds 1 and 3, because they are both physical objects and social rules.
- 19.
Popper’s arguments for situational analysis differ from those of Lewin. The reason to have mentioned Lewin’s formula was only to conveniently illustrate Popper’s claims.
- 20.
Caldwell (2004) states as follows: “Popper insisted that, whenever a theory employing the rationality principle is falsified, the appropriate thing to do is rethink one’s model of the situation. Crucially, one should never reject the rationality principle. By following this methodological principle, one gets ‘far more interesting and informative’ models (Popper 1985, 362). But it also means that, as a matter of methodological principle, the falsification of theories based on the method of situational analysis is never taken as grounds for rejecting the theory. Instead, any falsification immediately leads to an ad hoc theory adjustment, a redescription of the problem situation, thereby immunizing the theory from falsification. That Popper’s description of how explanation takes place in the social sciences appears to be inconsistent with his prescriptions about the importance of falsifiability and the avoidance of immunizing stratagems has often been remarked on by methodologists (e.g., Hands 1985; Caldwell 1991)” (Caldwell 2004, pp. 395–396, italics in original).
- 21.
Nadeau calls it the D-N diagram rather than the D-N model. We will use the names interchangeably.
- 22.
Nadeau states as follows: “if the universal statement (the theoretical law) constitutes the nomological part of the determinist D-N schema, it is apparently the RP that plays this explanatory role in the SL schema” (Nadeau 1993, p. 449).
- 23.
Hands (1991) calls the tension between Poppern and Poppers an ‘essential tension’ and argues that “it stems from Popper’s unfailing commitment to the covering-law model of scientific explanation” (p. 108). Caldwell (1991) also states that “Popper maintains that the structure of scientific explanation in both the natural and the social sciences follows the same pattern. In both cases, an explanandum is deduced from an explanans, which contains sentences describing initial conditions and at least one universal law” (p. 20).
- 24.
Although we cannot take it up in detail, Caldwell (1982) seems to think that it is impossible to expose a model to empirical testing (falsification) (p. 241). However, Popper does not think so. Since initial conditions can be falsified, the procedure of empirical testing is essential in constructing the situational model. In fact, in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper describes the procedure of falsification as follows: “By means of this mode of inference we falsify the whole system (the theory as well as the initial conditions) which was required for the deduction of the statement p, i.e. of the falsified statement” (Popper 1959, p. 56, italics in original).
- 25.
- 26.
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Kogawara, M., Matsuo, Y., Yeo, HS. (2023). Popper’s Methodological Individualism and Situational Analysis. In: Bulle, N., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41512-8_5
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