Philosophy of the Social Sciences
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DOI: 10.1177/004839302237834
2002 32: 455
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Allen Oakley
Popper's Ontology of Situated Human Action
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10.1177/004839302237834
PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2002
Oakley / POPPER’S ONTOLOGY
Popper’s Ontology of
Situated Human Action
ALLEN OAKLEY
University of Newcastle
Popper’s version of situational analysis, with its focus on the logic of situations
and the rationality principle, fails to provide cogent explanations of the human
decisions and actions underpinning social phenomena. It so fails because where
he demanded objectivism and formalism in the social sciences, his substantive
arguments lost contact with the psychological and subjectivist realities of the
human realm. But Popper also devised some key elements of a social ontology. It
is argued that although there are crucial gaps in his ontology, it can be aug-
mented to give situational analysis the potential to reach beyond pure logic and
rationality and to bring social theory closer to grasping the real world of human
action.
It is well-established that in his philosophy of the social sciences,
Popper chose situational analysis (SA) as his metatheoretical point of
reference (1960, 140f; 1983, 358; 1994b, 166, 168f).
1
In the spirit of criti-
cal rationalism that he often advocated,
2
his main contributions to
developing this metatheory have been well worked over in debates
that now make up an extensive literature. Although his contributions
have been found by critics and sympathizers alike to have a number
of significant ambiguities and limitations,
3
the extant critiques have
nonetheless generally endorsed SA as, in principle, a congenial
metatheory for understanding and explaining social phenomena. The
critical focus of attention has been, rather, the weaknesses introduced
by Popper’s insistence that some abstract and universal principle of
455
Received 25 July 2000
I thank two anonymous referees whose insightful comments assisted in the develop-
ment of this article. The usual caveat about responsibility applies. Thanks also to the
estate of Sir Karl Popper for permission to quote from Popper’s writings. The research
for this article was supported by a small grant from the Australian Research Council.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 32 No. 4, December 2002 455-486
DOI: 10.1177/004839302237834
© 2002 Sage Publications
at The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester on July 26, 2011
pure rationality form the activating core of the situational model of
social action.
Popper provided extensive representations of SA as a methodolog-
ically driven technique of scientific analysis (1960, 35f; 1972b, 349, 353;
cf. Hands 1991). His explicit suggestions directed at what might be
done in the social sciences in order to maintain them methodologi-
cally close to the physical sciences were to adopt “the method of logi-
cal or rational construction.” By this, he meant “the method of con-
structing a model on the assumption of complete rationality (and
perhaps also on the assumption of the possession of complete infor-
mation).” The effect was to recommend the introduction into the
social sciences generally of an objectivism and formalism that he
referred to as the “pure logic of choice” (1960, 141). It is also apparent
that his belief in the methodological “unity of science,” and a conse-
quent espousal of an objectivist and scientistic vision of the social sci-
ences, was underwritten in part by the exemplar of neoclassical
microeconomic theory (see Oakley 1999a). There he found successful
and widely accepted analyses dominated by models in which the
arguments were confined to an instrumentalist combination of the
“logic of the situation” and the rationality principle.
One side of Popper found this methodological objectivism conge-
nial because of its consistency with his often expressed desire to keep
psychological and subjectivist arguments out of social theory. But evi-
dence abounds that this desire was not always realized, and argu-
ments concerning the ontology of human action are frequently found
in his writings. This other side of Popper depicts human agents as fal-
lible, as lacking the capacity to be fully rational, and as possessing
knowledge that is insufficient properly to inform their actions. This
suggests a recognition that no legitimate understanding and explana-
tion of the realities of decisions and actions can result from any repre-
sentation that relies on imposed constraints that are devised on
purely objectivist and methodological criteria. The logical rigor they
bring to social theory is purchased at the cost of losing contact with
the ontology that constitutes the roots of social action and events.
My aim in this article is twofold. First, I would like to demonstrate
the extent to which Popper provided elements of a human ontology
on which to ground a version of SA that reaches beyond the confines
of pure logic and rationality. The specific elements of Popper’s ontol-
ogy to which I direct my attention are his theory of self-identity, his
representation of the self as located within the three-worlds vision of
reality,
4
his defense of a philosophy of constrained human freedom,
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and the theory of traditions and institutions. These are elements of
human life-world circumstances with which all analysts should deal
when making claims to understand agents’ deliberations and actions.
Including them in social analyses enables us to say something about
what actually drives and shapes what agents do.
Second, my intention is to expose the limitations of Popper’s onto-
logical contributions and then to indicate how appropriate extensions
and revisions can, nevertheless, confirm the potential of his ontology
for devising an SA that can grasp and represent the real world of
human action. The suggested augmentations of SA will include
explicit allowance for the shortfalls in agents’ relevant knowledge
and for the deficiencies in their cognitive capacities, for the complex-
ity and temporality of the circumstances with which agents must con-
tend, and for the intricate social, institutional, and other dimensions
of the situations in and through which they choose to operate. The
general need is explicitly to recognize that human agents accept their
conditioning by situations and a prestructured reliance on others in
their problem-solving actions. Such acceptance is perceived as a
means of simplifying and regularizing their place in the world
around them, albeit with constraints on their freedom of action as a
trade-off. But they gain a world in which the facilities are available to
ensure that the results of actions have a contingent predictability of
sorts, a predictability that is at least an improvement on acting in
isolation.
The effect of providing SA with human foundations to replace
those reflecting strictly analytical predilections will be to demand a
rethink of the methodology that is appropriate for social theory.
Giving priority to representing the ontological origins of phenomena
in theoretical accounts will mean forgoing the absolute primacy of
achieving a closed deductive formalism. Cogent explanations of
events in the social world will be assessed on more than their logical
rigor. The key will rather be to represent the human actions that can
account for phenomena, with substantive content becoming more
important than analytical form. In the end, the consequence will be to
drive a wedge into the “unity of science,” with the social sciences sep-
arating their methodology from exclusive reliance on the objectivist
tenets of the natural sciences. Just what this separation will mean for
the methodology of representing and accounting for what is observed
in the human realm will not be canvassed in any detail here. Never-
theless, the distinctive nature of the objects of social scientific inquiry
will be made sufficiently apparent to reinforce the conclusion that
Oakley / POPPER’S ONTOLOGY 457
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formalist and objectivist models are unlikely to deliver explanations
that fully grasp the ontological roots of such objects.
The article consists of four subsequent sections and a conclusion. In
section 1, I deal with the image of the human agent in Popper’s work.
In particular, the focus is on the treatment of the mind as the basis for
self-identity. The individual self is revealed as an existentially free
and isolated agent who must nonetheless contend with the problems
and potentials of an external real world. Popper depicted the universe
of reality confronted by agents by means of his three-worlds vision.
This is shown in section 2 to enable us meaningfully to locate agents
and to represent their fundamental operational situation as a
prestructured external frame of reference. Section 3 then takes up and
critically assesses the idea that in deciding how to act in situ, within
the three-worlds framework, human agents can be understood and
represented as applying cognition and reason to their circumstances.
The critical point in this section is that the inherently delimited nature
of agents’ capacities, competences, and knowledge, together with cer-
tain incorrigible facts of their circumstances not made apparent in the
three-worlds vision, can be shown to mitigate against the real-world
application of pure reason in the decision-making process. Be this as it
may, agents must still find a way to act with the maximum of pur-
poses and effect in response to the predicaments they confront, and
they can do so only within and through the structures of the world
they inherit. The fundamental principle that underpins section 4 is
that in reality, human agents situated in such an omnipresent inher-
ited world enjoy only a constrained freedom when deciding how to
act on their own behalf. Popper drew attention to this, and it indicated
to him the need to augment the three-worlds framework if it is fully to
embrace the structures and conditions that actually surround agents.
To a limited extent, the required extensions and revisions are touched
on in Popper’s own writings, especially in his brief exposition of the
role of traditions and institutions. But, as I establish in section 4, there
are additional dimensions of these situational structures that
remained to be recognized. Once this is done, the result is an SA in
which individual human action takes on an ontologically explicable
regularity. But it does so with an ever-present contingent remainder,
manifested as the unexpected and unintended outcomes of individ-
ual and collective actions that afflict the human world. Finally, in the
conclusion, I review the main arguments of the foregoing sections,
draw together the critique of Popper’s ontology, and comment upon
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the possible methodological implications for the social sciences of
taking SA seriously.
1. MIND AND INDIVIDUAL SELF-IDENTITY
A key premise adopted here is that the social sciences are primarily
about understanding individual human decision making and actions.
Inquiries concerned with the world of social reality should have these
human concerns as their core and universal substantive content, so
that what agents do provides the foundation for all explanatory
accounts of observed social phenomena. Applying SA as metatheory
for the social sciences, therefore, needs a human ontological founda-
tion if it is to avoid the sort of instrumentalism that is implicit in Pop-
per’s arguments for an imposed situational logic that is animated by
the rationality principle. Now it is readily apparent that elsewhere in
his writings, he expressed views that defy such methodologically
driven arguments. In a number of places, he recognized that in a com-
plete SA, there is an inescapable link to be forged between the deepest
subjectivist ontology of the self-identifying individual agent and the
contingent and conditioned nature of their actions, as these are
directed and shaped by their situations. As will be established in this
and the subsequent sections, Popper took a number of quite impor-
tant steps toward giving this link its due recognition.
The center of attention in this present section is the nature of
human being as far as it informs our understanding of human action.
Popper, otherwise the methodological objectivist, was nonetheless
able to grant that the phenomena of the social sciences originate in a
subjective world of deliberated thoughts and ensuing actions of indi-
vidual human beings qua agents. Here, three things should be
emphasized from the outset. First, all agents with whom we are con-
cerned find themselves in a world where it is not practically possible
to avoid operating under the influence of situationally conditioned
circumstances. Although this section appears to deal with them in iso-
lation, this can only be an interim analytical convenience. Second, the
decisions to act on which we are to focus are those that have a more or
less momentous import for the material and general well-being of the
agents involved. They therefore warrant significant and detailed
applications of knowledge, planning, and calculation on the part of
the agents. And it is because of their significance and complexity that
these decisions are of most interest to social analysts. That is, the focus
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is, for example, on deliberations and actions that contribute to the
construction of a bridge, or to moving a family to another state in pur-
suit of employment. How people go about crossing the street and like
daily trivia are not at issue here, even though some of the same criteria
may apply to understanding their actions. Third, my concern with
Popper’s contributions to the SA metatheory is confined to a particu-
lar perspective on social theory. I focus only on establishing the
demands of its application to an understanding of contemporaneous
and deliberated decision making and action by individual agents
under given and present social and other circumstances. I am not con-
cerned with the evolutionary origins of those circumstances, nor with
the implications for them of applying the SA metatheory.
In investigating aspects of the human realm, Popper rendered the
self as the autonomous, volitional, and creative “unit” of action. His
emphasis was on free human beings, and he rejected any taint of
determinism, including that which might be claimed to flow from
neurophysiologically based accounts of thought and action that has
them as fully explained by particular brain states. That is, it was a folk
psychology that Popper implicitly accepted as the appropriate mode
of representing human agents and the intentional mental direction of
their agency (cf. Hands 1991, 115f.; 1993, 171ff.). In a dualist body-
mind perspective, the mind is more than physiologically constituted.
Premeditated and purposeful actions can then be properly accounted
for only by understanding the mental character and bounded capaci-
ties and competences of the self-conscious agents in whose decisions
the actions originate. In his own accounts of actions, Popper looked
“inward” through the body-mind relationship where mental and
physical actions are the products of controlled and directed processes
that compose the mind. At the same time, though, as will be explained
in detail in the sections to follow, he looked “outward” to the situa-
tional environment that conditions the mind, confronts the self as
problematical, and provides the medium in and through which pur-
poseful action is to take place.
It was in his analyses of the body-mind relationship that Popper set
out his beliefs about the nature of the human self, unequivocally
founding it on an independent subjective, self-conscious mind. The
self and its mind are, he believed, existential characteristics of human
beings that are tied to, but always remain separable from, and less
than determined by, the neurological structures and operations of the
brain.
5
His argument was that as human beings, “we are embodied
selves or minds or souls” whose existence transcends anything that
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can be given a determinate physicalist explanation (1976, 188). In this
ontological vision, it is the subjective self and its conscious mind that
initiates, mediates, and controls action, so that what matters primar-
ily in understanding consequent events are the mental qualities,
capacities, and dispositions that agents bring to bear on the circum-
stances they confront in their environment (1972b, 251f).
According to Popper, now clearly deviating from his objectivist
predilections, the consequent challenge for social scientists in dealing
with the ontology of the human realm is “to understand how such
non-physical things as purposes, deliberations, plans, decisions, theories,
intentions, and values, can play a part in bringing about physical
changes in the physical world” (1972b, 229).
6
That is, in being inde-
terminist in our vision of the human predicament, we should try “to
understand how men . . . can be ‘influenced’ or ‘controlled’ by such
things as aims, or purposes, or rules, or agreements” (p. 230). We
should strive to understand “the influence of the universe of abstract
meanings upon human behaviour (and thereby upon the physical uni-
verse),” where such abstract meanings flow from interpretations of
“documents or pronouncements” that particular agents find relevant
in their environment, and include “such diverse things as promises,
aims, and various kinds of rules” that agents are prepared to honor
(p. 230f.).
7
Popper’s beliefs about the functioning of the human mind as the
driving force behind action require that agents apply and test their
externally acquired or personally invented theoretical knowledge of
the universe of reality in which they are situated. Indeed, his view of
personal knowledge was that it “consists of dispositions to act, and is
thus a kind of tentative adaptation to reality,” but with the caveat that
as agents, “we are searchers, at best, and at any rate fallible. There is
no guarantee against error” (1972b, 41). In the search for relevant
knowledge, we observe the world around us through the senses. But,
as Popper recognized, the act of observing is not enough to acquire
current knowledge of reality: “An observation is a perception, but one
which is planned and prepared. . . . An observation is always pre-
ceded by a particular interest, a question, or a problem—in short, by
something theoretical” (1972b, 342). And, as agents, our theories are
“the free creations of our own minds, the result of an almost poetic
intuition, of an attempt to understand intuitively” the world around
us (1972a, 192). It followed for Popper that although such theories can
be only “ill-reasoned guesses, bold conjectures, hypotheses,” it is out of
these that we must “create a world: not the real world, but our own
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nets in which we try to catch the real world” (1976, 60). Ultimately,
then, “the world as we know it is our interpretation of the observable facts in
the light of theories that we ourselves invent” (1972a, 191).
Two things that should influence our understanding of how agents
contend with theories that inform their actions should be noticed.
First, belief in particular theories cannot determine what agents do.
As Popper put it, “The control of ourselves and of our actions by our
theories and purposes is plastic control” in the sense that “we are not
forced to submit ourselves to the control of our theories” in any unilat-
eral way (1972b, 240). Second, it is also to be observed that as agents
who apply theories to circumstances, because we can critically moni-
tor and reassess any situational interpretations that fail us, “not only
do our theories control us, but we can control our theories (and even
our standards): there is a kind of feed-back here” (p. 241). Indications
are that if analysts are to give sound accounts of action, there is a
pressing need to inquire more fully into the cognitive and rational
capacities of agents and into how they acquire and apply knowledge
under the circumstances of their decision making.
The image of individual human agents recognized in Popper’s
writings provides us with some important insights into the funda-
mental ontology that is to be represented by means of SA. From the
“inner” perspective of the mind, agents are volitional beings who
make decisions on subjective and interpretive criteria. The decisions
that concern us here are those that are intentional and have expected
consequences of significant moment. For SA, the problematic primar-
ily comprises the confrontation of these individual agents with the
world around them, a confrontation in which they apply their intel-
lectual and other capacities, guided by knowledge, beliefs, and theo-
ries. Popper’s ideas about agents’ vision of this world and how they
use its structures and functions is the subject of the next section.
2. THE THREE-WORLDS REPRESENTATION
OF THE HUMAN SITUATION
My intention in this section is to demonstrate that Popper’s three-
worlds vision of the universe of reality provides a useful foundation
for the construction of an ontologically informed SA metatheory. In
arguing out the meaning of the vision, he implied that it is no more
than a heuristic frame of reference that can be applied to accounting
for how agents are situated in their life-world. He especially empha-
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sized that he saw the specification of three worlds as pragmatic and
having no essentialist status per se: “I would never fight in favour of
the theory that there are only three worlds. You can sub-divide them as
much as you like, and such subdivisions may for certain problems be
quite important.” He went so far as to make it explicit that the vision
“is a metaphor which helps us to see certain relations,” so that the
three worlds “are signposts and nothing more” (1994a, 119).
Be this as it may, social analysts will be argued here to need such a
framework and its “signposts” in order to contain and regularize their
vision of what is otherwise a world of analytically unmanageable
complexity. Most important, it will become evident below that in his
own expositions of the vision, Popper intended to give primacy to its
role in a discursive understanding of what individual agents do in
dealing with their worldly problems. In any useful formulation of SA,
the fundamental requirement is that agents are depicted as interact-
ing with their situations. In its most general terms, the three-worlds
vision should be read as a frame of reference that provides rudimen-
tary ontological insight because it gives some basic structure to the sit-
uations within, through, and by means of which agents may be
argued to operate.
Taken at its face value, the three-worlds vision enables us, first of
all, to represent human beings as located in and contending with a
world 1 that comprises the universe of physical reality surrounding
them. The external physical elements of world 1, be they of human
construction or natural origin, must be confronted by agents as the
field and medium of their actions. Their mode of contending with this
world, and using it to their best advantage, is devised by means of a
world 2 that includes all the subjective processes that originate in and
constitute human mental activity. As Popper put it, the focus of world
2 is “the psychological world” that is “studied by students of the
human mind.” It is “the world of feelings of fear and of hope, of dispo-
sitions to act, and of all kinds of subjective experiences, including sub-
conscious and unconscious experiences” (1982, 114). These world 2
processes are, at the same time, to some extent shaped and contained
by the access agents have to a world 3 that consists of all the accumu-
lated and recorded products of human intellectual activity. It is to be
noticed, though, that world 3 is itself a product of the human intellect.
The claims to knowledge of reality that it records are thus fallible and
fungible. So, access to this realm of accumulated knowledge provides
agents with no more than insecure and contingent guidance for
action.
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In establishing the origin, constitution, and status of world 3, Pop-
per drew a sharp distinction between “concrete world 2 thought pro-
cesses, with their correlated world 1 brain processes, on the one hand,
[and] on the other hand, the abstract content of our thoughts, the infor-
mation which our thoughts contain: the informative thought content”
(1978, 15). Thus, one dimension of thought comprises those subjective
mental processes that belong only to a person’s world 2, so that there
exists “knowledge or thought in the subjective sense” consisting of “a state
of mind or of consciousness or a disposition to behave or to react”
(1972b, 108). The other dimension covers the products of the mind
existing as the “statements in themselves” that comprise the contents
of thought. There also exists, that is, “knowledge or thought in an objec-
tive sense, consisting of problems, theories, and arguments as such.”
But this “objectivity” is claimed only because the knowledge resides
in recorded form outside the mind of any agent, even its originator, and
is, in principle, accessible by any other agent in that recorded form
(p. 108f.).
Popper took “the world of linguistically formulated human knowledge
as being most characteristic of World 3” (1982, 116). For example, the
knowledge contained in a book (as an exemplar of the world 1 physi-
cal manifestation of any world 3 object) originated as the thought of
its author, was reproduced in a written linguistic form, and remains
just that, independently of whether the book is ever read. But its
importance for human ontology is that agents can read and interpret its
given contents in building up the subjective knowledge that will
inform their deliberations and actions. Indeed, as with all world 3
objects, the only importance of the book and its contents is what
agents are individually able to make of it in use. Popper also often
insisted on the “autonomy” of world 3 (1972b, 159, 161). But this
“autonomy” had a particular and circumscribed meaning for him,
being confined to recognizing that world 3 objects remain inert and
ineffectual, without meaning that is of functional significance, until
they are “activated” by human, world 2, intervention. For the present
purpose, this pragmatic view of “autonomy” reinforces the primacy
that should be accorded to the characteristics of agents’ actual access
to world 3. For, to reiterate, knowledge extraction and acquisition are
conditional upon the talents of agents and expenditure of scarce
resources to an extent judged to be warranted by their anticipated
benefits.
It is evident from these insights that in the three-worlds vision,
there can be no escaping the crucial operational role played by world
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2 mental processes in generating, directing, and shaping human
action on the basis of knowledge. But there is also a conditioning of
world 2 processes present that harks back to Popper’s image of the
agent as self argued out in the previous section. We need to allow for
this conditioning because “we are not born as selves”; we must, there-
fore, “learn that we are selves” as well as “to be selves.” From our indi-
vidual perspectives, “this learning process is one in which we learn
about World 1, World 2, and especially World 3” (Popper and Eccles
1977, 109). It takes place within and through a particular social situa-
tion over time from earliest childhood to maturity (p. 110). Thus,
“being a self is partly the result of inborn dispositions and partly the
result of experience, especially social experience” (p. 111). What is
most apparent in this argument about the simultaneously condi-
tioned and active status of world 2 is Popper’s desire to relate human
action to the emergent self-identity of the agents involved. This self-
identity was viewed as based in the self-conscious, but always
situationally conditioned mind of the agent, and it was this condi-
tioned mind that he saw as controlling all aspects of action. It is this
combination of nature and nurture that determines the cognitive
capacities and personal knowledge that agents bring to their contem-
porary problem circumstances as these are thrown up by their loca-
tion in, and knowledge-based interpretations of, world 1 and world 3.
But it is important to realize, too, that the extent and depth of agents’
access to the contents of these worlds cannot be taken for granted.
Knowledge extraction and acquisition are conditional in two senses.
One is that they depend upon the talents of the agents concerned. The
other is that they have a resource cost that needs to be assessed against
the benefits that the knowledge bestows. And as we are to see in the
next section, these benefits have an emergent quality that renders
them by no means easy to measure ex ante.
The use of the three-worlds framework as far as Popper envisaged
it is evident in his own indicative example of human agency in a par-
ticular operational situation. He wrote of “the planning, construction
and the use of bulldozers for the building of airfields,” and that for
such work to proceed, “there is, first, an interaction between the
World 2 planning by the human mind and the internal restrictions of
both World 1 and World 3 which limit the planning of the machinery”
(1982, 117f.). This is a classic, albeit rudimentary, enunciation of how
situational structures and resources shape and facilitate the actions of
human agents. In this example, worlds 1 and 2 and 3 are, in a sense,
“linearly” related and mutually interacting, so that world 2 is posi-
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tioned “between” the other two worlds. In their involvement in the
constructions, world 2 mental structures and processes are the means
by which agents plan about and make use of the physical resources
that they find in world 1. World 2 similarly gives them access to the
intellectual records of world 3. In each case, the caveat cited above
about the limits of knowledge access applies.
The physical effects that their actions have in reshaping particular
features of world 1 flow from their capacities and strategies in dealing
with the problem circumstances they identify. World 2 operations are,
then, self-conscious mental activities that are partly the products of
the demands of world 1 but that at the same time also help to revamp
the affected features of world 1. Simultaneously, world 2 is partly the
product of, and also helps to produce, modified world 3 objects. As a
result, “World 3 objects have an effect on World 1 only through human
intervention, the intervention of their makers.” Such intervention
means that theories, plans, and programs of action that stem from
world 3 “must always be grasped or understood by a mind before they
can lead to human actions, and to changes in our physical environ-
ment” (1978, 23). Thus, in the example, prior to their use in building
anything, all the interactions of the three worlds that contribute to the
construction of the bulldozers must have been fully realized. Popper
continued, here emphasizing the dualist body-mind vision, that once
the bulldozers are on site, “we have an interaction between World 2
and the World 1 of the human brain, which in turn acts upon our limbs
which steer the bulldozers” (p. 118). Here he recognized the need for
world 2–devised action to activate the otherwise inert set of world 1
structures and conditions and the objective intellectual records of
world 3.
Now Popper’s example can be readily extended and made more
complex by adding specific engineering details to the requirements of
the construction process, and by the inclusion of economic and envi-
ronmental criteria in the location and design decisions that precede
construction. Design decisions are multidimensional: they are subjec-
tive initially and flow directly from world 2 inputs, but these are
immediately tempered by the need to make the design suitable for the
given world 1 conditions and by the dictates of what is known about
the physics of construction from the records of world 3. Further exten-
sions might include deciding on the relative priorities to be attributed
to economic and environmental considerations over and above the
design and engineering requirements. Deciding such priorities will
be a complex subjective process that will probably draw on the input
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of a number individuals who have nonengineering roles in the design
and building team. These agents will derive different aspects of
knowledge from world 3 and will be concerned about different
aspects of world 1. A problem for their joint world 2 inputs may be to
resolve the conflicts that emerge when such priorities must be allo-
cated. In all such extensions, then, the three-worlds heuristic provides
useful insights into why and how agents act in concert to bring the
project to completion.
What emerges from the three-worlds vision as a framework for
understanding human ontology is Popper’s recognition that voli-
tional human beings acting as agents are conscious of, are condi-
tioned by, and adapt to the demands of the multiple dimensions of the
external situational environment in which they find themselves. This
is the foundation of the SA metatheory, and it was expressed by Pop-
per in the summary forms of the physical world 1 and the intellectual
world 3. But further reflection reveals that the three-worlds vision can
provide only a simple sketch of the realities confronted by agents. It
omits much about the very complex structures and processes through
which their actions devised in world 2, with the aid of interpretations
of world 3, convert the world 1 resources of nature into useful things.
The next section examines a fundamental problem not made
apparent in the analyses of the three worlds so far. World 2 represents
agents as having the common crucial ability to reason, albeit with
varying access to relevant knowledge and with varying degrees of
acumen. But largely unnoticed by Popper was the notion that apply-
ing reason itself is constrained by certain inherent characteristics of
external circumstances in ways not broached in the three-worlds
vision. As we are about to see, this creates profound difficulties for
active agents and for their depiction by analysts applying the SA
metatheory.
3. REASON AND CIRCUMSTANCES
Much of Popper’s own treatment of the human application of rea-
son in dealing with their life-world circumstances in the guise of the
rationality principle suggested that it need be little more than an “ani-
mating” assumption within the “logic of the situation” (1994b, 169,
177). This argument is firmly grounded on the artificial presumption
that human agents can be represented as perfectly rational in the
sense that they successfully and fully realize all their preferences by
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optimal means, given the resources available to them. In this pre-
sumption, agents have been described as instrumentally or substan-
tively rational in devising and carrying out their actions.
8
Nevertheless, it was apparent to Popper that such an extreme ratio-
nalist depiction of agents lacks realism. In expressing the sense in
which he expected rationality actually to apply in devising actions, he
conceded the subjectivity and fallibility of agents by making the point
that “admittedly, human beings hardly ever act quite rationally (i.e. as
they would if they could make the optimal use of all available infor-
mation for the attainment of whatever ends they may have)” (1960,
140). This is an open-ended assertion implying that there will exist in
the outcomes of all complex actions a remainder of nonrational ori-
gin. Popper sought, though, analytically to negate the significance of
such problems by advocating what he called the “zero” method
(p. 141). His idea was to treat purely rational conformity to the logic of
the situation as a “zero co-ordinate” of optimality, on the basis of
which real-world actions can be argued as “deviations.” But the real-
ity is that the zero method can explain nothing. It is certainly the case
that actual actions will involve and result in deviations from any such
zero state of perfection and that these deviations have explanatory
power in principle. The crucial problem that is to be addressed in this
section is that it is not possible to define the zero state in this context,
so the strategy is fatally flawed. Complete information, defining the
logic of the situation, and pure rationality are all unable to be defined
in real-world problem solving. In terms of Popper’s more guarded
assertion quoted above, the puzzles emerge of what constitutes “opti-
mal use,” how information comes to be defined as “available,” and to
what extent this information is relevant and sufficient. The fact is,
then, that the extent and significance of deviations will always defy
specification. So it is that no precise meaning can be attributed to a
zero reference point for rationality as a matter of human praxis.
Advancing the realism of the metatheory of the social sciences
depends upon grounding them on something more ontologically rel-
evant than this untenable use of externally imposed containment of
human action.
At one point, Popper defined SA with a measure of ontological sen-
sitivity as “a certain kind of tentative or conjectural explanation of
some human action which appeals to the situation in which the agent
finds himself” (1972b, 179). He continued on in this same vein to sug-
gest that as analysts, we should “try, conjecturally, to give an idealized
reconstruction of the problem situation in which the agent found him-
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self, and to that extent make the action ‘understandable’ . . . that is to
say, adequate to his situation as he saw it” (p. 179). Here, Popper’s refer-
ence was expressly to the subjectivity cum psychology of an “ade-
quate” action response to the problem circumstances in which the
agent “finds himself.” The implication is that this action is under-
taken on the basis of some individualist concept of the agent’s knowl-
edge, understanding, and interpretation summarized in the rider “as
he saw it.” As analysts, we are expected to “conjecture” an “idealized
reconstruction” of this scenario. I will go on to argue here that this
more realistic suggestion by Popper is far more problematical that he
seems to have realized.
By referring to the meaning actually attributable to circumstances
by agents, Popper showed that he was quite prepared to modify his
understanding of what their rationality can achieve. At one point, he
proclaimed that as an observation about actual human behavior, “the
rationality principle seems to me clearly false” in the ontological
sense that individuals can often be seen to act contrary to the apparent
logic of their situations. This ostensibly aberrant conduct was seen as
having its roots in the fact that there are “obviously, vast personal dif-
ferences, not only in knowledge and skill . . . but also in assessing or
understanding a situation. And this means that some people will act
appropriately and others not” (1994b, 172). He noted, too, that there
may be a “clash” between the agents’ depictions of their situations
and the way they are in reality if they experience some “difficulties in
seeing certain aspects of the situation as they were.” Under these cir-
cumstances, “we may well say that . . . [they] did not act rationally”
because of an evident failure fully and correctly to grasp their situa-
tions (183f. n.19). In these observations, Popper effectively allowed
that rationality may be regarded as an empirical reference in which
agents are bound to act only upon what they are really able to know
about, and are actually capable of doing in response to, their situa-
tions. He attributed primacy to the agents’ states of mind when devis-
ing and directing action. This means that actions can be properly
accounted for only by providing an understanding of the means and
limitations of agents’ acquisition and application of knowledge and
of the cognition and reasoning powers they bring to dealing with the
external circumstances in which they find themselves.
In recognizing the limited extent of agents’ mental capacities when
confronting external circumstances and planning for action, Popper
suggested that rationality is a pragmatically “bounded” concept.
9
What Popper did not give due weight to is the argument that agents
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are sufficiently aware of the shortfall in their intellectual capacities in
these respects to adopt reasoned, problem-solving strategies that are
consciously delimited in their scope and ambition. There is a sense in
which this “boundedness” of agents’ capacities is not absolute, for
many cognitive skills, as well as available knowledge, can be
enhanced if the decision is made to devote additional scarce resources
to the endeavor. Nevertheless, “boundedness” is ultimately incorrigi-
ble, for any decision to devote resources to acquiring further skills
and knowledge of their circumstances brings agents to the question of
what constitutes sufficient skills and knowledge for the task ahead.
That is, on what criteria should the decision to stop spending
resources be made? No absolutely rational response to this question is
possible because the value of new skills and knowledge cannot begin
to be assessed until agents have them and until they actually use them
for their deliberations and test their effects in the results of actions.
And the resource cost is immediately a sunk cost because such acqui-
sitions are “nonreturnable.” Ultimately, assessing the worth of skills
and knowledge is a strictly ex post process, when it is all too late.
So it is that in their decision making and ex ante resource use for
that purpose, agents may realize that the best they can do is to pursue
some sort of suboptimal compromise. This will reflect their own
capacities, delimited knowledge, and interpreted circumstances and
take the place of agonizing over the attempt to maximize or optimize
one or more measures of their achievement and well-being. The objec-
tives that agents set for themselves are then expressed as a set of
“acceptable” outcomes, and they direct their deliberations toward
formulating actions that seek only to reach these outcomes.
10
Here,
too, the result is that analysts face an object of explanation that mani-
fests a less than wholly rational ontology.
There is juxtaposed to these agent-centered limits to rationality an
often underrecognized need to understand the true nature of agents’
circumstances and what they can actually know about them. The cru-
cial consequence here is that any representation of the reasoning and
deliberations of agents as a closed logical argument is rendered prob-
lematical. To devise reasoned action responses to problems that are
fully in accordance with the inherent logic of their circumstances,
agents must be shown to have complete knowledge of what those cir-
cumstances are as far as they are relevant to the problem.
11
As we have
seen, the very idea of agents possessing personal knowledge of any
required data is quite ill-defined. One reason for this is their inability
to decide ex ante when “sufficient” knowledge is held. Another rea-
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son to which attention should now be drawn is that so much about
which agents must deliberate and decide relates to the temporal
dimension and time experience of their existence. With their orienta-
tion toward future, present problems can be dealt with only by deci-
sions that flow from deliberations in which real time is the structuring
medium. In all such cases, the actions chosen will deliver returns to
agents in the future, so time becomes of the essence in the delibera-
tions leading up to choice. Because of this inexcludable temporal
dimension in agents’ deliberations, their knowledge of existing cir-
cumstances is not only always “incomplete,” it is also incompletable.
This is a result of the inevitable open-endedness of possible future sce-
narios introduced by the need to imagine what cannot actually be
known about time to come. Confrontation with time-experience and
the incompletable knowledge of circumstances renders agents’ appli-
cation of reason inconclusive at the critical point in their delibera-
tions.
12
The effect of all this is that agents must be seen to contend with
another compounding and even more intractable source of limits to
their rationality.
In the problem circumstances that agents actually find themselves,
their intellectual shortfalls are aggravated by the fact that they need to
be conscious of the crucial role time plays in defining their situations
and actions. This especially involves them in somehow working with
and adapting ex ante to an uncertain future set of relevant conditions
about which any claim to have knowledge is strictly speculative. Pop-
per was sensitive to this subjectivist issue. He wrote that we all have
“a sense of time, with oneself extending into the past . . . and into the
future.” Agents must all deal with the continuity and irreversibility of
time, and they can only do so by applying theoretical reasoning to
their circumstances, “at least in its rudimentary form as an expecta-
tion” (Popper and Eccles 1977, 110). Now, when located explicitly in
time, “intelligent actions” can only be “actions adapted to foreseeable
events.” But these events must themselves flow from the making of
decisions that are based on “foresight, upon expectation; as a rule,
upon short term and long term expectation, and upon the comparison
of expected results of several possible moves and countermoves”
(p. 73). Here Popper emphasized that future events that might result
from these “moves and countermoves” are only “foreseeable”
through the imagination of agents. When confronting a problem, they
must invent “alternative possibilities” that are “tried out and their
consequences are anticipated, and this anticipation then demands
that we have some sort of imagination of these consequences” (1994a,
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119). Most important, Popper realized that although intuition and
imagination are unreliable as guides to action, they remain “indis-
pensable as the main sources of our theories” (1972a, 28). As agents,
he went on to note, we cannot escape the source of contingency that
“in ordinary life we have to act all the time and we have to do so
always on the basis of imperfect certainty” (1972b, 79f.). In contend-
ing with the future, agents have no choice but to begin from such
knowledge reshaped in the form of expectations. Popper formulated
a concept of expectations as these are held by agents: “We may charac-
terize an expectation as a disposition to react, or as a preparation for a reac-
tion, which is adapted to (or which anticipates) a state of the environ-
ment yet to come about” (p. 344).
Whatever the potential of these ontological insights, they were
once again left in limbo as Popper failed to press on and fully expose
their subjective implications. In particular, what he did not make suf-
ficiently clear is that expectations are formed ad hoc as a means of con-
tending with uncertainty when deliberating about and initiating par-
ticular actions in response to specific problems confronted here and
now. The required conjectures can only be the products of agents’
imaginations applied as insecure extrapolations from, or other modi-
fications to, their interpretations and personal theoretical and factual
knowledge of the past. Because of this imagined status, the set of con-
jectures about future circumstances and outcomes of actions that
might be devised cannot be anything but open-ended. Somehow, in
order to be able to choose how to act, agents must artificially close the
set. They can do so only on the basis of devising a pattern of feasible
future scenarios, as they believe them to be, and under the given circum-
stances, as they understand them. What it can mean for agents to acquire
knowledge and to apply cognition and reason under such conditions
needs to be pursued in more depth than Popper chose to do.
Agents will seek to mitigate these contingent facts of decision and
action in an attempt to retrieve some of the efficacy of their problem-
solving capacities. In confronting and dealing with a complex and
uncertain universe of reality, one possible strategy for them is to seek
out any means they can to improve the regularities of their immediate
environment and thus to narrow the scope and increase the reliability
of what they can expect to happen to them within it. For Popper, this
need for existential regularity had deep ontological roots. As human
agents, he wrote, “we should be anxious, terrified, and frustrated, and
we could not live in the social world did it not contain a considerable
amount of order, a great number of regularities to which we can adjust
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ourselves” (1972a, 130). Agents have an “immensely powerful need for
regularity—the need which makes them seek regularities; which
makes them sometimes experience regularities even where there are
none; and which makes them cling to their expectations dogmati-
cally” (1972b, 23). One key means of establishing regularity of action
is for agents to plan and operate within and through any available
structures and relationships that are relevant to their purposes and
problems. Here we have come full circle back to the SA metatheory
proper. The focus is now on understanding how situational condi-
tions are structured so as to be able to assist agents to overcome some
of the difficulties they face in making reasoned decisions and acting
with maximum effect in problem solving.
4. AN ONTOLOGY OF HUMAN SITUATIONS
Popper emphasized this fundamental structural dimension of SA
when he argued to the effect that “our actions are to a very large extent
explicable in terms of the situation in which they occur,” even though
“they are never fully explicable in terms of the situation alone” (1962,
97). And to put the latter point of qualification more emphatically, he
observed that “the human factor is the ultimately uncertain and way-
ward element in social life and in all social institutions. Indeed this is
the element which ultimately cannot be completely controlled by
institutions” (1960, 158). Nevertheless, he was definite in his anti-
psychologistic adherence to what he called “institutionalist views”
when he stressed that “no action can ever be explained by motive
alone.” For if motives, “or any other psychological or behaviourist
concepts,” are to be cited in explanations, “they must be supple-
mented by a reference to the general situation, and especially to the
environment.” And, with the human environment “very largely of a
social nature,” this means that “our actions cannot be explained with-
out reference to our social environment, to social institutions and to
their manner of functioning” (1962, 90).
In these passages, we have Popper opening up some of the most
fundamental theses of the SA metatheory. Most specifically, he drew
attention to the idea that SA uses the extant structures within and
through which agents conduct their actions in order to represent these
actions as having some ontologically explicable regularized content,
that is, to remove as far as possible the contingent dimensions that
might otherwise dominate individual responses to life-world prob-
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lems. At issue in this section is the extent to which he provided the
necessary development of this idea and what suggestions can be
made for correcting any shortfall in his development.
Popper believed that in understanding and explaining human
action as the link to their situations, we should begin from the notion
of agents’ ultimate existential freedom. He was plainly aware,
though, that such a concept of freedom has no pragmatic status in a
world where agents interact with their situations. Specifically, in
accounting for action, we should depict this freedom as “not just
chance but, rather, the result of a subtle interplay between something
almost random or haphazard, and something like a restrictive or selective
control—such as an aim or a standard—though certainly not a cast-
iron control” (1972b, 232). That is, as agents, “though we are free, to
some considerable extent, there are always conditions—physical or
otherwise—which set limits to what we can do.” To this he added the
operational rider that “of course, before giving in, we are free to try to
transcend these limits” (p. 252). These indeterminist facets of the
human realm amounted to “the idea of combining freedom and control”
and as “the idea of a plastic control” (p. 232). Agents also adopt “ideal
standards of control, or of ‘regulative ideas’ ” (p. 237) in order to articu-
late critical assessments of the outcomes of their actions with a view to
learning, adaptation, and modification as these may be pertinent to
future actions. This amounts to another dimension of plastic control
over agents’ actions that arises as a result of feedback from experi-
ence. The feedback stems from self-critical or interagent critical argu-
ments that constitute “a means of control: . . . a means of eliminating
errors, a means of selection” for future reference (p. 239). That is,
“under the pressure of a need for the better control . . . of our adaptation
to the environment” (p. 240), agents build and adapt to “a growing
hierarchical system of plastic controls” by means of which they
resolve their ever-changing problem situations (p. 242). But be this as
it may, Popper was aware that for individual agents, it is a fact of
social life that the subjectivity and complexity of their situation means
that the most carefully planned actions have outcomes that are as
intended and to various degrees unintended (1972a, 124f.). Thus,
“nothing ever comes off exactly as intended,” and “we hardly ever pro-
duce in social life precisely the effect that we wish to produce, and we
usually get things that we do not want into the bargain” (p. 124). It is,
Popper believed, a characteristic problem of social life that there exist
“unintended consequences, and more especially the unwanted conse-
quences which may arise if we do certain things,” and we find it a con-
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sequent need to explain “how the unintended consequences of our
intentions and actions arise . . . in a certain social situation” (pp. 124,
125).
Some reflection on these generalizations about how agents con-
tend with their situations, however, soon reveals that they are located
and act in a world containing natural and human-made structures
and conditions that extend beyond, and blur the boundaries that are
evident in, the structural framework of Popper’s three-worlds vision.
Structures, and the accompanying conditions of action that they bring
with them, surround individual agents on all sides. Consider first
how agents contend with the content of world 1. Structures of human
origin may be physical in their manifestation. In this respect, they are
included, along with the given features of the natural realm, as world
1 objects. They present agents with a particular objective situation, a
set of physical-technical structures, relevant aspects of which they
will see the need to use and to allow for when pursuing their pur-
poses. To the extent that physical structures are to be involved in any
human action, they may bring with them certain physical demands to
which agents must conform if the action is to be a success. It can be
argued that there is a very real sense in which much of economy and
society is “structured” by the absolute need to work with physical-
technical structures as an essential means of survival and well-being.
While there can be no question of agents’ actions being uniquely or
unilaterally determined by the demands of the physical-technical
realm, it is important to recognize that actions that work best must be
those that are at least consistent with such demands.
However, many human structures have no more than what has
been called a “virtual” existence. That is, they are not defined by and
have no necessary physical existence.
13
In such social and economic
structures as family households, markets, corporations and govern-
ment organizations, there exists a mutual interdependence between
structure and agency. Indeed, they have a manifest existence that is
itself the product of the joint actions of their constituent agents. What
this means is that for agents as individuals, the very form of the struc-
ture and its perceived import is partly determined by their participa-
tion in it and the way they allow it to shape and carry out their actions.
In this sense, structures are not absolutely given entities that dictate
only the constraints that afflict all actions. Agents also find in them the
functional means they require to supplement and complement their
own limited capacities in addressing life-world problems.
14
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Now in the context of Popper’s three-worlds framework for repre-
senting human ontology, it might be argued that these virtual struc-
tures and conditions should belong in world 3 because they are the
manifested products of cumulative intellectual activity. But, on his
own terms, they can do so only tenuously because of their lack of
objective and autonomous substance. In most of their dimensions,
they have an existence and form that is the immediately manifested
product of their participating agents’ actions. They are, that is, an
inseparable combination of world 2 and world 3. Moreover, as struc-
tures that confront agents, they are just as “real” as those with a physi-
cal existence. That would place them in world 1. This ambiguity in
positioning these pervasive structures is one indication that as a rep-
resentation of the human situation, there will be some important ele-
ments missing from the heuristic of a discrete three-worlds vision.
We have seen that Popper identified a belief in theories about how
their world is structured and functions as a fundamental subjective
means by which agents cope with situational complexity. In this, they
are aided by the evolution of traditions of conduct and institutions,
which he saw, in effect, as virtual situational structures that play “a
role similar to that of theories” in the sense that they, too, “are instru-
ments by which we try to bring some order into the chaos in which we
live.” He recognized traditions as a significant force in controlling,
but not determining, the development of the human psyche and the
character of many human actions: “Quantitatively and qualitatively
by far the most important source of our knowledge—apart from
inborn knowledge—is tradition” (1972a, 27). Moreover, institutions
and traditions have “just that function of bringing some order and
rational predictability into the social world in which we live” (p. 131).
It is for this reason that “people try not only to learn the laws of their
natural environment . . . but also why they try to learn the traditions of
their social environment.” Thus, they “tend both to create traditions
[and institutions] and to reaffirm those they find by carefully con-
forming to them and by anxiously insisting that others conform to
them also” (p. 132). The import of agents accepting their positions in
situational structures was clearly seen here as a means of mitigating
the contingency of individual action.
15
So it was that Popper saw virtual structures in the form of tradi-
tions and institutions as accepted by agents and integrally involved in
the way they carry out their actions. He was also conscious that the
evolution of traditions and institutions is the largely unplanned prod-
uct of the need for individual agents most often to live and function in
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relationships with others. That is, these social structures reflect the
fact that the outcomes of agents’ actions are dependent upon what
cognate others around them do at the same time, with one of their fun-
damental functions being to regularize what agents can expect from
one another. Indeed, one of Popper’s defining characteristics of an
institution was that it refers to a body of people who “observe a cer-
tain set of norms or fulfil certain prima facie social functions . . . which
serve certain prima facie social purposes.” He wrote of traditions as
similar in that they “describe a uniformity of people’s attitudes, or
ways of behaviour, or aims or values, or tastes” (1972a, 133). And, as
he put it elsewhere, “at any moment of time we, and our values, are
the products of existing institutions and past traditions.” This existen-
tial fact imposes “some limitations on our creative freedom, and on
our powers of rational criticism” (1974, 1168).
What Popper hinted at in these passages, but did not pursue to any
depth, is the fact that it is the modes of participation of agents in tradi-
tions and institutions that actually shape their actions. In particular,
his analysis of these structures did not penetrate to their constituent
rules and roles so as to expose how they might be interpreted and
applied by agents in devising their conditioned actions. This is an
issue that cannot be dealt with fully here, and only some indications
of what is involved will be given. Virtual structures offer agents rules
that facilitate mutual comprehension and assessment of interdepen-
dent actions by agents. They are not to be envisaged as rigid or immu-
table, but are rather based upon accepted practices that have evolved
because they have so far proved to be mutually advantageous to the
agents concerned. Such rules are not analogous to those of chess, for
instance, where the rules exist independently of any particular game
or players, and in any game, the only moves used and allowed are
those directly consistent with the rules.
16
Rather, the rules have an
effect on action that is, in part, the product of the ways agents choose
to deal with them. One reason for the lack of any unique correspon-
dence between rules and agents’ actions, then, is the subjective nature
of the interpretation of rules. A further reason is that actions are medi-
ated not only by individual agents’ knowledge and capabilities but
also by the resources they are able to bring to bear on increasing such
knowledge and capabilities up to some level believed to be “suffi-
cient.” Although not set in the context of rules, we saw above that
Popper showed a limited recognition of both these factors as perti-
nent to understanding the contingent remainder that will always be
part of agents’ actions as they are accounted for by SA.
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The particular activities in which individual agents are repre-
sented as engaging are often depicted in social theory as the manifes-
tations of roles that are framed within the rules of virtual structures.
Rules may provide that structures consist of social positions and nom-
inal roles that direct what is expected of constituent agents. Once
again, though, the existence of roles should be understood as provid-
ing no more than basic guidelines for the actions that agents actually
carry out. The specific function of roles will be apparent only as they
are put into practice, and it is these practices that emerge from role
prescriptions by virtue of agents’ actions.
17
The institutional dimen-
sion of Popper’s SA just did not reach into these matters of inner con-
stitution and function.
CONCLUSION
Popper’s scientistic and rationalistic version of SA was confined to
arguing out models in which an imposed situational logic and the
rationality principle were given priority. In the foregoing sections, a
number of key elements of his ontology of situated human action
have been identified and critically considered. Although his inquiries
concerning the foundations of social theory were scattered and often
desultory, when they are read as a whole, the results are found to
include some fundamental insights into what is required of a more
ontologically pertinent application of SA.
If social theory is to be ontologically grounded and to apply the SA
metatheory, we need to address some fundamental questions. That
Popper was aware of the issues raised in these questions has been
established in the sections above, and some indications have been
given of the limited extent to which he chose to pursue their implica-
tions for the design of SA. First, what do we know about individual
human agents from the perspective of the cognitive and other mental
capacities they bring to their life-world situation and its problems?
Popper’s foray into psychology in his analyses of the body-mind rela-
tionship, and in his theory of the self as the essential “unit” of action,
led him to argue that it is the congenital and conditioned mind that
directs action. He touched on some relevant ideas when referring to
the need to link such things as motives, purposes, intentions, and val-
ues to action when he emphasized the role of interpretation and
meaning in individual theory formation and when he posited deliber-
ation as prior to decision and action. Most important, he recognized
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that it is the human capacity to interpret, to give personal meaning to,
and to theorize about external circumstances that enables them to act
with purpose in their own perceived interest. But he also drew atten-
tion to the important caveat that in this endeavor, individuals have
delimited capacities and their designs for action are fallible. In the
end, though, his representation of the self did not convey any specific
understanding of the formation and application of an active con-
sciousness.
18
Second, SA requires us to be specific about what constitutes the
substantive form of the situations within and through which eco-
nomic agents operate in order to solve problems and pursue their
objectives. Popper gave some substance to this matter by positing his
three-worlds vision of the way individuals are located in the universe
around them. Here we find the individual mind that constitutes
world 2 positioned between two worlds. World 1 is a physical realm
of facilities and problems about which agents must learn and within
and on which they must act. World 3 is an intellectual storehouse of
knowledge that can be drawn upon and applied to whatever extent
agents are capable of and deem worthwhile. This is an image of the
situated agent that turns out to be highly subjective because it must
always be the mind that decides and initiates action. But now it can be
seen explicitly to do so under the influence and within the confines of
relevant external conditioning.
In Popper’s psychology of the self and in the three-worlds vision,
the account given of situated agents and their conditioned actions
takes only a rudimentary form. Further questions need to be posed
and addressed. Specifically, the third question concerns the true
nature of the circumstances that agents confront in the real world and
the impact this has on their ability to deal rationally with problems as
they emerge. It is evident that Popper was very much aware that the
rational capacities of agents are always restricted in two senses: one is
a compound of their own inherent mental and knowledge limitations
in the face of a highly complex world; the other is the product of the
temporal dimension of their world and of their location within it, the
effect of which is to make explicit the fact that decisions and actions
are the creative products of the need to deal with an unknowable
future. Although he was sensitive to the existence of these restric-
tions, he did not choose to pursue their implications for SA to the
extent warranted. Ultimately, the delimited intellectual capacities of
agents were given little explicit part in the problematic of accounting
for human action. No indications were given as to how agents form
Oakley / POPPER’S ONTOLOGY 479
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theories about their world, how they acquire knowledge about their
circumstances, what sets the limits to this knowledge, and how they
form expectations about the future and choose between the imagined
scenarios they must conjure up.
In spite of these gaps in his individualist ontology, he did move on
to address a fourth, related matter of significance. This is the search by
agents for a means of simplifying and regularizing their life-world
and their discovery of such means in the structures provided by the
traditions and institutions around them. That is, for most momentous
decisions and actions, the medium is some social-structural frame-
work, be it an organization, an institution, or society more generally.
Here again, though, Popper’s treatment lacked the scope required to
give SA the ontological substance it needs. In all of these respects, his
analyses did not penetrate sufficiently into the operational interface
between individual agents and the categories of situations they might
confront. His representations of agents using structures to reduce the
complexities and uncertainties of deliberating and acting were cur-
sory. How socialization, traditions, roles, and rules that are the mani-
festations of social structures of all sorts impose plastic controls over
agents was not given enough prominence, and his depiction of the
nature of the circumstances agents must contend with was confined
to the generalities of traditions and institutions. He also gave little
emphasis to the internal shaping of regularized actions by the struc-
tures within which agents participate.
Finally, in the treatment of the SA metatheory outlined in the previ-
ous sections, the issue that demands our further attention is the extent
to which Popper’s methodological “unity of science” can be sus-
tained and defended when devising explanations in the human-
social realm. The crucial factor in addressing this issue is what is
believed about the ontological status of human phenomena as objects
of scientific investigation. Do these objects originate and exist in the
same absolutely independent spatial and temporal sense as those of
the natural world do? Because they are generated exclusively by indi-
vidual human actions, with all their attendant subjective and tempo-
rally variable exigencies, and because of the ever-present unintended
individual and collective outcomes of such actions, this cannot be the
case. No phenomenon, natural or human, ever takes place under
exactly the same conditions because, in all its facets, the world con-
stantly moves on. Nowhere can one “step in the same stream twice.”
In the case of natural phenomena, the pace of change is slow and the
import for explanations minimal. But where human phenomena are
480 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2002
at The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester on July 26, 2011
concerned, the process of change is endemic and incorrigibly influ-
ences agents as selves, their skills and knowledge, the nature of their
problems, and their deliberations and actions in response. In the
above critical analysis of Popper’s confrontation with the implica-
tions of ontological contingency for SA, the crucial emergent question
to be answered is, If there is to be any human-social science, given his
demarcation criteria and his demand for a concurrent adherence to
the notion of realism in science, along with his joint defense of an
ontology of indeterminism and human freedom, what methodology
is appropriate and what epistemological status will arguments have?
This is a question that has not been answered here, and it remains the
subject of a continuing controversy in the social sciences.
NOTES
1. All reference citations without an author are to Popper’s writings.
2. For arguments that critical rationalism is the only sustainable methodological
contribution by Popper to the social sciences, see Boland (1997, especially 260ff.) and
Hands (1993, 149ff.; 1996).
3. Most recently, these contributions were the focus of the Vienna Workshop on
Popper’s Situational Analysis and the Social Sciences held in 1997. The papers from this
workshop were published in two parts in Philosophy of the Social Sciences (vol. 28, nos. 3
and 4, 1998) under the editorship of Egon Matzner and Ian Jarvie. Papers included were
Agassi (1998); Bichlbauer (1998); Boland (1998); Faludi (1998); Hedström, Swedberg,
and Udéhn (1998); Jarvie (1998); Matzner and Swedberg (1998); Matzner and Bhaduri
(1998); Nottorno (1998); and Ormerod and Rosewell (1998). This literature also contains
a number of the contributions from economic methodologists, among them Blaug
(1985, 1992, 1994), Boland (1997), Caldwell (1991, 1994), Hands (1985, 1991, 1992a,
1992b, 1993, 1996), Latsis (1972, 1983), Nooteboom (1990), and Oakley (1999a, 1999b).
There are, as well, several important contributions from social science philosophers,
including Apel (1983), Bunge (1996), Farr (1983), Glück and Schmid (1977), Jacobs
(1990), King-Farlow and Cooper (1983), Koertge (1974, 1975, 1979), Lagueux (1993),
Nadeau (1983), Settle (1983), Schmid (1988), Winch (1974).
4. Some of Popper’s social science critics have made passing reference to the three-
worlds reality, including Bunge (1996); Faludi (1998); Farr (1983); Hands (1993);
Hedström, Swedberg, and Udéhn (1998); Jacobs (1990); Koertge (1975, 1979); Settle
(1983); and Simkin (1993). But none of these authors has connected it with the body-
mind theory and gone on fully to elicit the human ontology that emerges in Popper’s
thought.
5. This primary thesis of the dualism and interactionism between the physical state
and processes of the brain, and the psychological processes that constitute the self-con-
scious mind, was argued most explicitly in Popper’s contributions to the book he wrote
with John Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (1977).
6. In this and all subsequent quotations from Popper’s writings, the emphases
shown are in the original.
Oakley / POPPER’S ONTOLOGY 481
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7. In this depiction, Popper foreshadowed what other social theorists, such as John
Searle, would refer to as “intentionalistic explanations in the social sciences” (Searle
1991). Elements of Popper’s situational analysis (SA) metatheory reappear as integral
to some of the characteristics of Searle’s intentionalistic vision of human agents and the
social sciences. Human agents have consciousness, and “with consciousness comes
intentionality, the capacity of an organism to represent objects and states of affairs in the
world to itself” (Searle 1995, 7). And in the social sciences, “explanations of human
behavior make reference to intentional causation,” “social phenomena are permeated
with mental components and are self-referential,” and there is “linguistic permeation
of the facts” (Searle 1991, 332; cf. 1995, 9ff., 33ff.). In a similar vein, Doug Mann envis-
ages human action as consisting of “three distinct strata”: “the intentions of the actor;
the meaning of the act . . . and its structural context” (1999, 165, original emphasis). Pop-
per would have been at home in this framework, for he too recognized the intentional
nature of action based on interpreted meaning and taking place in an externally struc-
tured environment.
8. “Descriptive instrumental rationality (DIR)” is one type of rationality cited in a
taxonomy presented by Doug Mann (1999, 167ff.). More specifically, DIR may be
argued in a “literal” sense that attributes such rationality to the actual actions of agents,
or in a “methodological” sense that imposes it in order to allow the use of formalist
models in the social sciences. Mann aligns DIR with the presumptions of rational choice
theory that Popper found to be so prominent in mainstream economics, albeit in its
methodological guise only (see Oakley 1999a). Similarly, Herbert Simon (1982) draws
the distinction between the presumed substantive rationality of rational choice theory
and what he calls procedural rationality, in which the reasoning process is integral to
any explanation of human action.
9. Cf. Herbert Simon’s “bounded rationality,” in which it is recognized that “the
capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small com-
pared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in
the real world—or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality” (Simon
1957, 198, original emphasis). Popper might well have concurred with Simon that when
we focus upon the procedures of reasoning, on Simon’s procedural rationality, we find
that what agents can achieve is heavily circumscribed: “For most problems that Man
encounters in the real world, no procedure that he can carry out with his information
processing equipment will enable him to discover the optimal solution, even when the
notion of ‘optimum’ is well defined” (Simon 1982, 430).
10. Simon (1982) refers to a method of “approximating mechanisms” and a generic
objective he calls “satisficing” (p. 260).
11. To draw on the wisdom of George Shackle (1972), “ ‘Rationality’ is an empty and
idle term until the data available to the individual are specified,” for “to act by reason, a
man must be fully informed of his circumstances so far as they bear on the outcome of
his actions” (pp. 37, 91).
12. Cf. Shackle (1972), who stated that “time is a denial of the omnipotence of rea-
son . . . [for it] divides the entirety of things into that part about which we can reason,
and that part about which we cannot” (p. 27).
13. Here I draw on the extensive work of Anthony Giddens, albeit only to a very lim-
ited extent. His theory of “structuration” is much richer than is conveyed in my desul-
tory references (see Giddens 1979, 1984).
14. Giddens (1979) defines a duality of structures in which “the structural properties
of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices that constitute
482 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2002
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those systems” (p. 69; cf. 1986, 533). Moreover, for Giddens, the very existence and con-
ditioning influences of virtual structures may be manifested only in the human
instantiation of their operations and functions: “there is no ‘anatomy’ in social life apart
from its ‘physiology,’ ” and social structures “cease to be when they cease to function”
(1979, 23, 61, original emphasis; cf. 1986, 541).
15. An aspect of institutions not given due prominence by Popper is that some may
continue to function only on the condition that the necessary reach of mutual belief
among their constituents in their worth and efficacy is maintained. This is an argument
that has been emphasized by John Searle as an extension of his distinction between the
intrinsic and observer-relative qualities that things may possess (1991, 339; 1995, 9ff.,
37ff.).
16. As Giddens (1979) points out, a more appropriate analogy is found in the emer-
gent rules of children’s games where first, “rules and practices only exist in conjunction
with one another,” and second, there is no “singular relation between ‘an activity’ and ‘a
rule’ ” (p. 65, original emphasis).
17. As Giddens explains, each agent will have a “social identity that carries with it a
certain range (however diffusely specified) of prerogatives and obligations that an
actor who is accorded that identity (or is an ‘incumbent’ of that position) may activate
or carry out” (1979, 117). Again, here he emphasizes that as is the case with rules, no
determinism of action responses can be linked to roles. In fact, he goes further and
argues that it is “fundamental to affirm that social systems are not constituted of roles but of
(reproduced) practices; and it is practices, not roles, which (via the duality of structure)
have to be regarded as the ‘points of articulation’ between actors and structures”
(p. 117, original emphasis).
18. The wider import of this is that Popper did not pursue any phenomenological
understanding of consciousness (cf. Wagner 1983). Some key features of a
phenomenological social theory in which SA is the focal point are found in the works of
Alfred Schutz (1962, 1964, 1967; cf. Oakley 2000, 2002).
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Allen Oakley is in the School of Policy at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is
the author of a number of books in the history and philosophy of economic theory, most
recently Classical Economic Man (1994), The Foundations of Austrian Econom-
ics from Menger to Mises (1997), and The Revival of Modern Austrian Econom-
ics (1999). His most recent research was devoted to preparing a book titled Recon-
structing Economic Theory: The Problem of Human Agency (2002).
486 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2002
at The John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester on July 26, 2011
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