Abstract

In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, Popper argues that there is no essential methodological distinction between human and natural sciences. Each of them, he claims, endeavors to elaborate and test causal explanations of the phenomenal world. However, in later writings he revises his position. The very notion of "situational analysis" is more and more identified with the notion of "objective understanding." Such a notion is thought of as referring to the method which is peculiar to the human sciences. I show that the peculiarity of this method lies in the fact that experience is no longer investigated by means of "the principle of causality." Rather, it is investigated by means of what Popper calls "the principle of rationality" or "the principle of the adequacy of actions."