ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why legal practice might find it difficult to digest rigorous descriptive social science. Consequently, openness to implicit knowledge insures the law against falling prey to the current inabilities in the social sciences. The higher the premium on methodological rigor in the law, the more difficult it becomes to harness the existing implicit knowledge to improve decision quality. The difference between explanation or prediction and decision making translates itself into a fundamental difference in methodology. Lawyers rightly sense that mathematics and statistics are foreign languages, as are the conceptual languages used in informal analysis. The chapter summarizes the main arguments in favor of integrating rigorous descriptive social science into law. Although both the social sciences and law are thus open to social construction, they are in very different ways. While most social science aims at falsification, most legal science is hermeneutical.
