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1 Ratio Juris 1 (1988)

handle is hein.journals/raju1 and id is 1 raw text is: Ratio Juris. Vol. 1 No. 1 March 1988 (1-19) copyright © Hans Albert 1988 Critical Rationalism: The Problem of Method in Social Sciences and Law* HANS ALBERT Abstract. The author characterizes the model of rationality devised by critical rationalism in opposition to the classic model of rationality and as an alternative to this. He illustrates and criticizes the trichotomous theory of knowledge which, going back to Max Scheler, is received in a secularized version by Habermas and Apel, also under the influence of the hermeneutic tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer and of the so-called critical theory of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adomo. The author criticizes historicism as it expects to be an alternative to naturalism and not to make use of the method based on scientific laws. The author proposes as an example of technological social science the model developed in economics starting from Adam Smith. With regard to legal theories, natural law is rejected because of its sociomorphic cosmology. It is proposed that legal science as social technology has two parts. One part aims at efficient interpretations of valid law (for the space-time region concerned) and a second part aims at the construction of efficient norms for the modification of valid law by legislation.** I. Critical Rationalism and Its Model of Rationality Karl Popper has characterized his book The Open Society and Its Enemies as a critical introduction to the philosophy of society and politics (Popper 1950, v). Some of his critics reject this characterization and accuse him of scientism; they take his social philosophy to be nothing more than an inadequate - because positivistic and therefore undialectic - socio-political extrapolation of a methodology (Habermas 1963, 253). This criticism appeared for the first time in the so-called German Positivist Dispute. It has been further developed by Karl Otto Apel and by Paul Lorenzen and his school - the so-called Erlangen School - in the philosophy of science. The criticism is not directed against Popper's philosophy of science alone, but against the broader view which is known as critical rationalism; it is thus directed against Popper's political theory as well. I am grateful to John Wettersten for his help in revising the English version of this paper. ** Abstract by M. La Torre.

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