Abstract
In his lectures at the London School of Economics, Karl Popper said he hoped that we students would try out his philosophy in the various fields into which we moved. The career opportunities available to me in 1950 took me into the area of overlap between social anthropology and sociology. Several years of research and teaching passed, during which time I saw little opportunity to draw on Popper’s advice until, in 1957, I met Joseph Agassi. The subsequent story has, necessarily, to be autobiographical, but it might have a wider import.
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Notes
- 1.
It was indeed an example of conventionalism, but Agassi’s statement that I had proposed a theory turning on a postulated gap in British society astonished me. An earlier writer had explained white people’s observance of social distance towards non-whites as a consequence of their beliefs about how members of their peer group would judge their behaviour. I had added that they would also observe social distance because they viewed non-white immigrants as strangers who could not be expected to behave in the same ways as members of their white peer group.
- 2.
In his 1960 opposition of Holism and Individualism he is primarily concerned to assess the two approaches in terms of their ability to explain intended institutional reform or the absence of reform (Agassi 1960: 261). Popper’s essays on problem-solving (written for a wider readership) were likewise mainly concerned with political problems.
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Banton, M. (2017). Critical Rationalism in Sociology. In: Bar-Am, N., Gattei, S. (eds) Encouraging Openness. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 325. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57669-5_31
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