Social Personality
65
open to indirect scrutiny in view of the weight of empirical evidence they generate,
may be valued if they appear to retain or gain explanatory power over time.
A subsequent debate suggesting that single instances of nonconfirmation are
typically insufficient to force the elimination of a theory led Lakatos and Musgrave
(1970) to argue for the practical necessity of a ‘sophisticated falsificationism’ which
values bodies of ideas according to whether they appear
progressive or
degenerating
over time. Crucially, this requires a blurring of scientific and nonscientific categories.
The scientist’s decision of whether to accept or reject a theory now depends upon how
they experience Kuhn’s ‘essential tension’ between paradigms which, as the previous
section has revealed, must hinge to some extent upon personality variables.
It remains to be specified that the theories which Popper is thinking of are
problem-oriented. They are geared towards limited efforts
at economic and social
planning which he terms ‘piecemeal social engineering’. Although Popper treats the
evolution of knowledge through such ventures as ‘blind forays into the unknown’,
he adds that they are never truly ‘random’ because they are always drawn forward by
the contents of world 3. This happens, he argues, because deliberation assumes both
that a particular problem is recognised and requires attention, and that knowledge
always exists to suggest why past strategies, or indeed inactions, have failed to yield
desirable results (Popper in Schilpp 1974, 1061).
The appeal of Popper’s argument might even increase
if the following theory
of political decision-making is accepted. Niklas Luhmann has pointed out that
problem-oriented political deliberation by decision-making elites can be understood
to involve the playing out of cathartic dramas of risk containment:
Politics works in episodes, in short stories each ending with a collectively binding decision,
a symbolic gesture of conclusion. The political system is thus free to turn to new topics or
to await feedback from old ones (Luhmann 1993, 165).
Although controversy exists over whether ‘policy cycle’ constructs provide an
effective basis for modelling policy processes, they remain widely used (Howard
2005). According to Luhmann’s usage of the policy cycle metaphor, then, political
risks are transferred to the legal system by acts of legislation and regulation. When the
legal
system fails to quell them, they filter back to policy-makers and the curtain rises
for a new act. Crucially, however, this risk transfer cycle must be viewed as operating
within narrow confines. Where long enduring and clearly defined problems (involving
for example health, education, and certain kinds of crime) demand recurring phases
(or ‘dramas’) of political deliberation and legal enforcement, it may well be possible
to speak of Popper’s ‘evolution of knowledge’. In such cases,
successive phases of
trial-and-error learning may well allow better practices to evolve.
However, Popper’s theory places a heavy reliance upon the
ceteris paribus clause.
His trial-and-error learning processes can best be envisioned as occurring within
relatively closed systems where decisive variables remain constant and new ones do
not emerge to threaten system homeostasis. We might develop this line of criticism
with reference to Otto Neurath and other philosopers of the scientistic ‘left wing’ of
the Vienna circle, who argued that outcomes must remain indeterminate wherever
insufficient knowledge exists concerning decisive variable interactions. For Neurath,
Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
66
prospects for achieving this knowledge are greatly reduced by epistemological
complexity arising from the reflexive component in decision-making. Danilo Zolo
summarises his argument as follows:
...
any possibility of certainty, or, following Popper, of ‘approximation’ to the truth, is
excluded because agents themselves are included in the environment which they attempt
to make the object of their own cognition. The agents may take critical – i.e. reflexive
– account of the situation of circularity in which they find themselves, but they cannot
remove themselves from their own historical and social perspective, or free themselves
from the biases of the scientific community, culture or civilisation to which they belong
and which influence their own perception of themselves. They cannot know themselves
objectively, but they cannot even know objectively
their environments either, since they
themselves alter the environment by projecting upon it their own biases when they interact
with it in making it the object of their own cognition (Zolo 1992, 7).
Policy-makers are thus condemned to learn from trial-and-error experiment only
through the distorted lens of a series of after-the-act
rationalisations by which they
try to interpret
why decisions were made. Interestingly, this was very much Pareto’s
view. Seeking to explain the ‘certainty of irrational experience’, Arnold Gehlen
stressed that:
Vilfredo Pareto has compiled evidence from six languages and sources spanning
centuries to present the convincing argument that human beings primarily behave in [non-
logical actions], that there is a “logic of feeling”, which
means that we often believe
something
because we have acted accordingly, and then formulate certainties to cover any
discrepancies … (Gehlen 1988, 297).
This view can readily be extended to cover collective as well as individual decision-
makers.
6
In fact, it seems to apply particularly well to circumstances where
governments and major political parties come under pressure to account for poor
decisions which they have made in the past. Given the unrelenting hostile criticism
which such institutions face, the acceptance of past failure is usually neither easy
nor politically desirable, and so politicians may very
easily settle upon contrived
reasons for past decisions. Moreover, we might envision Elster’s ‘civilizing force of
hypocrisy’ as often creating cognitive distortion by leading politicans to internalise
distorted understandings of past motives, as well as distorted images of the world,
in their efforts to deal with intense scrutiny and accountability pressures. Finding a
large measure of uncertainty and doubt in the reflexive self-assessments of decision-
making institutions, Niklas Luhmann even goes so far as to suggest that:
Organizations … are constantly involved in interpreting (observing) their own operations
and
seek goals, even new goals, that make what happens or has happened understandable
and determinable. Planning is for the most part a writing of the system’s memoirs
(Luhmann 1998, 105).
6 Zolo (1992, 7) points out that T.S. Kuhn, Ludwik Fleck and others have argued that
the problem of epistemological complexity similarly confronts individuals, social groups, and
scientific communities.