'Low evidence' situaties in de sociale en de historische wetenschappen

Samenvatting

'Low Evidence' Situations in the Social and Historical Sciences: Rational Choice as Heuristics. In past years, many studies in the philosophy of science were devoted to questions of historiography. Key issues included its scientific status and whether it was linked to the perspective of the researcher. Although such questions were eventually to provide insights into other disciplines, they did not do much to advance historiography per se. Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism (1957) constituted an exception by virtue of its suggestions regarding the reconstruction of historiography using the logic of situational act theory, and the need to pay more attention to the analysis of social movements. He further proposed that institutional analysis, based on rational choice theory, should be applied to the study of social movements. However, analysis of his works together with Abram de Swaan's arguments about rational choice theory (see abstract in SA 44:5) shows that when Popper used a heuristic scheme, the power of rational choice theory to account for low-evidence (limited sample size) situations was quite limited. 14 References. M. Meeks