Rationalism, Critical

Critical rationalism is a school in the philosophy of science and in political philosophy centered on the works of the Austrian-English philosopher Karl R. Popper. The Social Democrat Popper fled from Vienna and the Nazis in the late 1930s to New Zealand and established himself in London after the war. Critical rationalism is characterized by the method of trial and error, applicable in all scientific disciplines, philosophy, or politics according to its adherents. In a problem situation, a tentative theory is advocated to solve the problem. Thereafter, all efforts should be directed toward demonstrating the falseness of this theory (falsification, error elimination), and when this has been done, we are in a new problem situation but with increased knowledge. We have learned from our mistake. This optimistic belief in the possibility of the growth of knowledge justifies the label “rationalism.” Moreover, this rationalism is “critical,” since a prevailing theory should always be exposed to a maximum of criticism. This is a particularly demanding requirement for the theory constructor; however, it is a crucial purpose of critical rationalism to depersonalize research and its theories. This entry presents the basic tenets of critical rationalism, reflecting the mainstream of contemporary social science and beyond.

In a political science perspective, critical rationalism is crucial both from a methodological viewpoint and as a substantial political philosophy. [Page 2208]Moreover, critical rationalism indicates how the political scientist can make himself or herself useful to society. Although it is a challenge to follow them in actual research, the prescriptions of critical rationalism have become mainstream in political science or social science methodology textbooks, even if they are occasionally contested. Further, Popper's work on the “open society and its enemies” is an important ingredient in the political philosophy of the 20th century, known mainly for its attacks on the prophecies and societal utopias of Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx. It is actually in the spirit of critical rationalism that not even a classic Greek philosopher like Plato, normally over and above criticism, is spared. Subjecting his thought to criticism is a way of taking it seriously, according to critical rationalists. No historical or spatial barrier should protect against criticism. This side of Popper's work belongs to normative political theory. As shown below, these two aspects of Popper's philosophy, even though dealing with widely different matters, are well integrated in his own thought as they follow from a few basic assumptions.

It is not unreasonable to structure 20th-century philosophical debates around Popper: Popper versus the positivists (empiricists), Popper versus the relativists (the idealist philosophy of language or Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science), and Popper versus the Marxists and Neo-Marxists. Critical rationalism encompasses not only Popper's philosophical followers (e.g., J. W. N. Watkins, David Miller, Hans Albert, William Bartley, and Imre Lakatos) but also many natural scientists and social scientists. Seven theses of critical rationalism are formulated below and put in their proper context. Their relevance for political science and its debates are then briefly discussed.

1. Reality exists “out there” (philosophical realism). Philosophical realism asserts that reality exists independently from our language and theories about it. A corollary of realism is the correspondence theory of truth: Truth means a statement's correspondence with reality (as opposed to the coherence theory of truth, which stresses its coherence with previous knowledge, and the pragmatic theory of truth, which emphasizes its practical usefulness). This conception of truth is very commonsensical: Statements are about something, and if they fit with this something, the statements are true; otherwise they are not. This theory of truth makes it meaningful to compare theoretical expectations with observations of the relevant segment of reality, meaning that theories can, in principle, be evaluated and compared mutually as to how well they match reality. Therefore, some theories can be seen as better than others; one theory may represent progress in relation to another. This is a privilege compared with epistemologies, according to which theory and reality cannot be disentangled and therefore do not allow for any confrontation between them.

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