> No matter how much
> literary and sociological imagination one has, only a murderous
> racist can say that in their place one would join the lynch mob.
³The logical investigation of the methods of economics yields a result which can be applied to all social sciences. This result shows that there is a purely objective method in the social sciences, which may well be called the method of objective understanding, or situational logic. A social science orientated towards objective understanding can be developed independently of all subjective or psychological ideas. Its method consists in analysing the situation of the acting person sufficiently to explain the action in terms of the situation without any further help from psychology. Objective Œunderstanding¹ consists in realizing that the action was objectively appropriate to the situation. In other words, the situation is analyzed far enough for the elements which initially appeared to be psychological (such as wishes, motives, memories and associations) to be transformed into elements of the situation. The man with specific wishes therefore becomes a man whose situation may be characterized by the fact that he pursues specific objective aims; and a man with particular memories or associations becomes a man whose situation can be characterized by the fact that he is equipped objectively with particular theories or with specific information.
³This then allows us to understand actions in an objective sense so that we can say: admittedly, I have different aims and I hold different theories (from, say, Charlemagne); but had I been placed in his situation thus analysed - where the situation includes goals and knowledge - then I, and presumably you too, would have done what he did. The method of situational logic is certainly an individualistic method and yet it is certainly not a psychological one; for it excludes, in principle, all psychological elements and replaces them with objective situational elements. I usually call it the Œlogic of the situation¹ or Œsituational logic¹.² (K. Popper, In Search of a Better World, p. 79)
Ted Winslow