ABSTRACT
Social scientists look at the world from a large number of viewpoints – methodological, political, philosophical. Very often they attempt to make sense of what they observe by simplifying their view into a set of propositions about human behaviour. These propositions may be set out in forms that can be verified or rejected by comparison with reality (positivist social science) or in forms that do not depend on such comparison (dialectical social science). In this chapter attention will be concentrated on representations of reality or models that fall between the positivist and dialectical views. The models discussed are quantitative statements about how populations develop that derive from logical argument about the processes that affect those populations, which can be filled with empirical content, but for which tests of empirical validity are rarely formulated.
