Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
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tend to be more tolerant and innovative. However, we can for the present conclude 
that our struggle to balance Kruglanski’s three psychic motives helps explain why 
we should differ, along a conservative-liberal axis, in our responses to uncertainty. 
We may further conclude, in view of the argument that our orientations towards 
the status quo will align closely with our orientations towards risk and innovation, 
that conservative and liberal heuristics will each build a good deal of consistency 
and predictability into our orientations towards our object worlds, simply by fixing 
orientations towards these three vital objects.
3.5  The Evolution of Knowledge through Trial and Error Experimentation
The previous section has argued that our political decision-making is likely to be 
stabilised by underlying psychological orientations which supply heuristic guidance 
along a conservative-liberal axis under conditions of cognitive indeterminacy. This 
section will now provide a counter-weight by exploring the possibility that political 
strategies are unlikely to be fixed in accordance with the psychological orientations 
of either individual or collective decision-makers because they are instead subject 
to processes of evolution which draw them towards ever closer correspondence with 
strategies which are objectively necessary in view of the problems they address. From 
this perspective, practical rationality refers to the process whereby decision-makers 
progressively gain purchase upon problems because trial-and-error experimentation 
yields a growing stock of ever more useful knowledge which feeds back to inform 
future decisions.
In his later works, Karl Popper proposes just such a theory as a challenge to the 
epistemological relativism which we associate with the sociology of knowledge. 
Human knowledge evolves, Popper says, through an interaction between the 
individual and a realm of human cultural products which he labels ‘world 3’. Popper 
himself acknowledges that the very existence of a ‘world 3’ is open to controversy, 
and he offers no exact definitions. This realm is to be distinguished both from ‘world 
1’ (the physical world) and ‘world 2’ (the mental world) such that:
..in its role as mediator between world 3 and world 1, our mind (world 2) may depend on 
world 3 objects, such as melodies or arguments, which it “follows” or “grasps”; and the 
brain processes initiated by these world 2 processes may lead to action in world 1 such 
as speech or writing whose coherence is explicable in world 3 terms (it is “anchored” 
entirely in world 3) (Popper in Schilpp (ed.) 1974, 1056). 
One of Popper’s examples is a performance of Joseph Haydn’s ‘The Creation’ which 
made its composer announce, in tears, ‘It was not I who wrote this. I could not have 
done it’. Popper explains that every great work of art does indeed transcend the artist. 
The artist ‘constantly receives suggestions from his work, suggestions that point 
beyond what he originally intended’. Yet artists are not inspired, he continues, by 
the contents of their own unconscious minds. Rather, they tap into world 3 (Popper 
1996, 32). There they access not only the products of many other human minds, 
but also the ‘unintended interrelationships and interactions between these products’ 
(Popper in Schilpp (ed.) 1974, 1050). 

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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We might therefore look to world 3 in order to understand where cultural memes, 
and ‘active replicators’ in particular, derive their replicatory power. Yet Popper’s 
argument progresses on the basis that World 3 has an ‘informational content’. It
consists of certain ‘problems, theories and errors’ (Popper in Schilpp 1974, 1060) 
which may be subjected to ‘rational criticism’. Although Popper adds that the very 
existence of a human drive or instinct for exploration presupposes a world which is 
to some extent knowable and explorable (Popper in Schilpp (ed.) 1974, 1060), he 
appears to remain sensitive to the criticism that he does not specify the sphere of 
applicability for his proposed evolution. Some indication of how widely this sphere 
extends is however provided by Popper’s reference to a ‘world 3 method’: 
... we are always the prisoners of our prejudices, or of our framework of assumptions. But 
we can, with the help of the world 3 method of putting our assumptions and our theories 
outside us – of formulating them clearly, so that they can be criticised – always break out 
of this prison through rational criticism (Popper 1996, 139).
Popper’s understanding of rational criticism is not as rigidly defined as we might 
expect. As he suggested in his (1945) ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, rationality 
should be given the loose psychological definition of a ‘critical attitude’ or an 
‘attitude of reasonableness’:
We could then say that rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments 
and to learn from experience. It is fundamentally an attitude of admitting that “I may 
be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer the truth”. It is an 
attitude that does not lightly give up hope that by such means as argument and careful 
observation, people may reach some agreement on many problems of importance; and 
that, even where their demands and their interests clash, it is often possible to argue about 
the various demands and proposals, and to reach – perhaps by arbitration – a compromise 
which, because of its equity, is acceptable to most, if not to all (Popper 1945, 224).
This is not to imply that Popper’s critical attitude is consistent with that of his 
critics such as Paul Feyerabend (1975) who argue that scientific advance should rely 
upon a variety of methods. Rather, Popper’s reliance upon the specific method of 
‘falsificationism’ (e.g. Popper 1959) is best now explained, as this provides us with 
the method which he viewed as allowing world 2 to access world 3. 
Popper’s critical attitude seems to impose no limitations as to the forms of 
knowledge involved here. That is, Popper did not limit his belief in the evolution 
knowledge through the competition and elimination of theories by applying strict lines 
of demarcation between ‘scientific’ and ‘nonscientific’ theories. Rather, both kinds 
of theory were to be included within that world 2 knowledge which always remains 
fallible and conjectural as it moves ever closer to a one to one correspondence with the 
contents of world 3 (Popper in Schilpp 1974, 1060). This interpretation makes sense 
in view of Popper’s claim that both kinds of knowledge are, in principle, subject to 
elimination through falsification. Scientific theories are directly falsifiable by single 
instances of nonconfirmation. Nonscientific theories (including metaphysical but 
not pseudoscientific theories) are indirectly falsifiable because they may be used to 
generate directly falsifiable hypotheses. Nonscientific theories then, where they are 

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