Okay, thank you very much Dominique. Of course, I would like to first of all thank you all,

yourself, Henny and especially Martina who was the first person who contacted me.

And so I'm very thankful for giving me this opportunity to address

students in an interdisciplinary master's program which is very rare that one has the occasion to

address students coming from many different disciplines. As a professor here, as an associate

professor, most of the time I'm teaching students of economics or students of business. And so it

is very rarely that they have the occasion to be in contact with the students coming from other

disciplines within the social sciences which is the main focus of my recent scholarship.

Now, I guess you are now watching or seeing the slides in the screen. Now, this is an outline of

the presentation that I have prepared for you. I will use these slides both as a guide for me

and also as a way of helping you follow the argument, follow the line of argument.

So there will be a very brief introduction because I assume that many of you are not familiar

with Karl Popper, who is the object of this research. Then I will also try to provide you

briefly with some historical background for the controversies surrounding the topic of

situational analysis which is Popper's methodological proposal for the social sciences.

Then the second part of the presentation, I will focus on my own research which is an attempt to

provide a noble interpretation of Popper's formulation of situational analysis. And this

basically works, which is based on a number of controversies which have been taking place for

several decades now. It is unclear basically what Popper meant and his works are littered with some

contradictions and ambiguities that have been identified by scholars throughout the years.

So this is an attempt to make some progress both at the exegetical level but also to try to

develop situational analysis. And in this attempt to develop situational analysis, I will make a

brief suggestion to reformulate it in order to make it more attractive, more appealing

to social scientists. So that will be at the end of the presentation.

Now, the first, I want to start by saying that, well, some of you may be familiar or at least you

may have heard of Karl Popper who is one of the most influential philosophers in the 20th century.

He's probably best known for works like the Logic of Scientific Discovery, which is probably the

most important work on philosophy of science in the 20th century. But also he's quite well known

for his work on political philosophy, works like the Open Society and His Enemies, which is still

widely mentioned in the field of political philosophy. And perhaps the only extensive

work on the methodology of the social sciences known as or titled The Poverty of Historicism,

where he addresses a number of methodological issues in the social sciences and also a place

where, as in the Open Society and His Enemies, he criticizes, for instance, Marxism. And one of the

best known criticisms of Marxism is developed in these two books. However, his work on the

methodology of the social sciences, other than his work in The Poverty of Historicism, is relatively

unknown. And it is sometimes surprising that even particularly economists, for reasons that will

become clear later on, that economists are for the most part quite unfamiliar with Popper's

methodological proposal for the social sciences, in spite of the fact that he may be a very

familiar with the fact that in many different parts of his works, he expresses his admiration for

economics. And he even claims that situation analysis is an attempt to generalize the methodology

of neoclassical economics to the rest of the social sciences. I will come back to this later on.

Now, there are some early presentations, very brief discussions of situation analysis

in both His Open Society and His Enemies. And here in the slide, you can see the

pages or the chapters where this is discussed. And in The Poverty of Historicism, where he also

touches, briefly touches upon this issue, and also perhaps a bit more developed in the book

titled Objective Knowledge, which is the book on philosophy of science.

Now, situation analysis constitutes Popper's methodological proposal for both

both the historical and the theoretical social sciences. And essentially, it consists of this

study of historical and typical or recurrent social events by means of the construction of what he

calls situational models. Now, these situational models, which do not have to be necessarily