ABSTRACT
However, these sources of fallibility do not distinguish ‘the social from the physical sciences.’ What distinguishes them is ‘the fact that in social systems fallible human beings are not merely scientific observers but also active participants in the system themselves’ (p. 311). Indeed, we have argued that, from the standpoint of mathematical modeling of social processes, we must come to grips with the fact that individuals change how they understand and forecast outcomes at times and in ways that do not conform to an overarching probabilistic law.6 In Frydman and Goldberg (2013c), we show how Karl Popper’s insights concerning the role of the growth of knowledge for understanding historical change can serve as the basis for such formal models. In particular, we build on his proposition that ‘[i]f there is such a thing as growing human knowledge, we cannot anticipate today what we shall only know tomorrow’ (Popper, 1957, p. xii).
