ABSTRACT
The discussion of Karl Popper and Max Weber in this chapter could potentially be misleading. First of all, they were not contemporaries of one another. More importantly, the practices of interpretativist sociology and positivist social science are in general vastly different. Positivist social scientific practice does tend to be quantitative in nature, and the opposition between quantitative and qualitative social science, while a misguided and false opposition, nonetheless persists to this day to some degree. The description of a Weberian sort of analysis described in Popperian terms which follows is there only to make the point that positivist philosophy of social science is neither as naive nor as narrowly conceived as is sometimes supposed. But Popper is not a Weberian or vice versa!
