Theory and opposed-systems design

Abstract

I. Madness in Methodology? When, after nearly a decade of study and work in the field, I left mathematical logic and the logic of science, I made a resolution not to write papers on the methodology or logic of social science-for fear I would never learn any social science. It was all too easy at the time to publish applications of Boolean algebra or the calculus of relations or the like that could just conceivably be relevant to some future empirical study, in, say, economics. But I had the uneasy feeling that in offering guides for new approaches to social science, I might never approach very closely myself. And I did want to learn something of the facts of life and the substantive issues whose powerful interest had dragged me away from the more chaste attractions of logic. I also had an uncomfortable suspicion that the devastating remark of the great French mathematician, Henri Poincare, about sociology (The most methods, and the least results) might only too accurately describe the way one might dally in the approach to any social science in order to avoid actually going in and getting lost in a very dense jungle. Maps, brochures, the purchase of compasses, machetes, bush jackets, and rakish tropical helmets can be used as a