A dangerous imbalance

Innovation dynamics in the natural sciences and stagnation in the social sciences

The enormous technological innovations of our time (AI, digitalisation, miniaturisation, biochemistry, space technology and much more) are founded on the ongoing development of scientific theories; for it is only through the knowledge-driven race to develop generalisable systems of ideas (theories) and through research that all these innovations could emerge—a view associated with the philosopher of science Karl Popper, who wrote in his “Logic of Scientific Discovery”: The empirical sciences are systems of theories. The logic of knowledge could be called the theory of theories (Popper 1969: 31).

Accordingly, science must proceed logically and empirically, unlike, for example, the late medieval scholasticism of Meister Eckhart, as Harrington (2018) suggests. However, claims are all the easier to test empirically the more generally valid and precisely formulated they are—in other words, the higher their empirical content (Popper 1969: 86). Science therefore seeks to develop theories with as much content as possible (and thus theories that are as easy to test as possible).

Moreover, open theory-building is essential to effective academic freedom.

In the social sciences, and political science in particular, theory-building plays only a minor role today. Instead, the prevailing view is that scholarship should serve practice directly, in keeping with Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it (Marx 1845),

As a result, what is distinctive about science cannot develop and flourish: free, knowledge-oriented theory-building. Instead, those who control research budgets hold sway: political parties, networks and bureaucracy. The development of knowledge in the social sciences is stifled.

This creates a dangerous imbalance: while the natural and technical sciences have advanced at a breakneck pace for centuries, changing the world ever more rapidly and profoundly, political and social sciences have languished, unable and unwilling to develop a dynamic of knowledge. As a result, technological conditions are changing ever more rapidly and comprehensively, while sociopolitical self-understanding stagnates, even regresses, and ultimately eradicates itself.

In this situation, developing theories in the social sciences is of paramount—even existential—importance. It was with this in mind that Civility Theory was developed, and with this in mind that Civility gUG reaches out to academia, providers of civic education and policymakers.