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Philosophical Anthropology Can Help Social Scientists Learn from Empirical Tests
Author(s) -
WETTERSTEN JOHN
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5914.2007.00343.x
Subject(s) - falsifiability , epistemology , metaphysics , karl popper , philosophy of science , rationality , scientific theory , set (abstract data type) , sociology , point (geometry) , philosophy , computer science , mathematics , programming language , geometry
Popper's theory of demarcation has set the standard of falsifiability for all sciences. But not all falsifiable theories are part of science and some tests of scientific theories are better than others. Popper's theory has led to the banning of metaphysical and/or philosophical anthropological theories from science. But Joseph Agassi has supplemented Popper's theory to explain how such theories are useful as research programs within science. This theory can also be used to explain how interesting tests may be found. Theories of rationality may be used to illustrate this point by showing how they fail or succeed in producing interesting and testable hypotheses in the social sciences.