I found the following gem (beautiful strong statement, not necessarily true) attributed to Popper, cited by D.S. Heersink in his review of (Popper & Miller 1984 Popper selections):
- Humans exist in an "open" environment, while science's predictability requires a "closed" environment; ergo, all "human sciences" are at best informed or educated guesses. Their ability to predict is next to nil.
Note that for Popper and most of his contemporaries, the word "science" was reserved for and equivalent to the "natural sciences". That explains the double quotes around human sciences. Apparently, he wasn't aware of the struggles of psychology, sociology and many other "human sciences" to become as scientific as the natural sciences. Of course, one may question the appropriateness of this quest, but anyway, if you don't have much to stand on, you will probably try to imitate the approaches and methods of successful neighbors. And then, suddenly, out of the sky, there comes this voice from a respected philosopher of science: "Don't even try it! You won't be successful like us. You will not be able to predict anything. At most, you may be able to explain the phenomena you are interested in a little better than the layman. That''s all you may expect."
Link to the book:
- https://www.amazon.com/Popper-Selections-David-W-Miller/dp/0691020310
Thank you, I think it is a gem too and I agree with it. However, I think I have a different take on its implications as I do not see prediction as equivalent to explanation and understanding. I discuss that and doing quantitative human sciences and open and closed systems in this
Chapter The practice of quantitative methods
I had not seen the quote before I know of Popper's reaction to Alfred Adler's “individual psychology”.
For sure, prediction is not equivalent to explanation and understanding (it is in principle possible to predict something without really understanding how do you it, which implies, that you don't really understand the phenomena you predict).
Indeed, I was also quite surprised to find Popper reducing the goal of science to prediction, in this quote at least. Must have something to do with his approach to experimental science, hypothesis testing and the like.
Nonetheless there is generally the feeling (more than feeling?) that understanding is less than explaining is less than predicting. And if Popper denies us the holy grail of prediction, than at least he let us have the satisfaction of understanding and perhaps explaining.
Thanks for your chapter on the practice of quantitative methods. I'll have a look at it later today, and maybe I'll come back to you to ask one or more questions, too
Dear Kelvin,
Excellent article! I'm particularly happy to see that you didn't fall into the trap of playing quantitative research off against qualitative methods and techniques (v.v.). That decades-old debate doesn't lead to anything constructive, except strengthening the initial positions of the debaters.
In your paper, you give us a very detailed picture of what it means to conduct Quantitative Social Science (QSS) research, including the inevitable pitfalls and downsides of QSS. There are two or three things in particular that bother me (as a supervisor of many students doing a BA or MA):
- CR-based QSS seems to be quite difficult (not only conceptually), even for PhD-students without a solid background in methodological matters, let alone for beginning students;
- It may require an extreme long perspective and many resources to do it adequately (including e.g. a lot of "false starts");
- It may undermine its own high-quality claims and expectations as to a genuine source of intersubjective knowledge, to be used for e.g. public policy by relying upon so-called tacit knowledge which is - by definition - not researcher-independent.
Not that such reservations could not be raised against the natural sciences and their methodologies (far less perfect than most people claim or believe), but still: it raises a lot of difficult questions more than it solves the problems of doing QSS.
Or is there a kind of research bible in the tradition of CR/QSS which clearly and convincingly shows how it can be done? A handbook, a collection of excellent papers, more reflexive papers like yours?
Link to tacit knowledge (Polanyi);
- https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805824367
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