Artificial Societies and the Social Sciences

In 1961 the German Sociological Association invited Karl Popper to give a lecture on the logic of the social sciences, and invited Theodor Adorno to offer a critical response. It was to be a battle of the titans of postwar sociology, and afterwards became known as the “Positivist dispute” (Positivismusstreit) in German social theory. Yet from the beginning the debate went in an unexpected direction. Popper refused to accept the label of positivist, and explicitly attacked an inductivist and naturalist conception of science. Adorno was partially disarmed by this, and offered some reflections on Popper’s theses rather than the expected attack on positivist social science. These were not well received; Popper apparently found Adorno’s Hegelian language unintelligible, and complained that he was “simply talking trivialities in high-sounding language” [1]. The debate was carried on inconclusively for a decade by partisans of both schools.1 Popper’s original suggestions, and Adorno’s response to them, were soon forgotten as the protagonists retreated to well-worn defensive positions. It is interesting to speculate whether this debate might have gone differently if the development of methods for the study of “artificial societies” had begun fifty years earlier.2 In retrospect it seems evident that both Popper and Adorno were struggling with the limitations of a social science methodology based on descriptive statistics. Yet they approached this problem from nearly opposite perspectives. Popper described his methodology as “criticist” rather than “positivist,” and argued for a view of scientific method as consisting of “tentative attempts at solutions.” To this Adorno made two responses. First, he argued that social theory must be able to conceive of an alternative to contemporary society: “only through what it is not will it disclose itself as it is . . . ” [1]. This led him to a critique of descriptive statistics as the primary tool for social inquiry. He argued that “A social science that is both atomistic, and ascends through classification from the atoms to generalities, is the Medusan mirror to a society which is both atomized and organized according to abstract classificatory principles . . . ” [1]. Adorno’s point was that a purely descriptive, statistical analysis of society at a given historical moment is just “scientific mirroring” that “. . . remains a mere duplication. . . . As a corrective, it is not then sufficient simply to distinguish descriptively between the ‘collective realm’ and the ‘individual realm’ as Durkheim intended, but rather the relationship between the two realms must be mediated and must itself be grounded theoretically” [1] (emphasis mine).