POPPER, HAYEK E A (IM)POSSIBILIDADE DE PREDIÇÕES ESPECÍFICAS EM CIÊNCIAS SOCIAIS

Abstract

In The Poverty of Historicism and in The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper argues for the idea that there is no essential methodological or epistemological distinction between human and natural sciences. Each of them, he claims, endeavors to elaborate causal explanations of the phenomenal world and to test them by means of specific predictions. In his latest essays, however, he reviews this viewpoint, since the importance of causality declines vis-à-vis the necessity of the falseacionism. Hayek, on the other hand, in his writings about the methodology of the social sciences has always maintained that predictions in the social sciences (which he classifies as complex phenomena) are not of discreet events, but of classes of events. My aim here is to confront this two positions, arguing that Popper gradually incorporates Hayek's proposals.