The alternative is empiricism and epistemic positivism. But empiricism in social science can only seem to take us so far. It doesn’t tell us enough about how to interpret people in the micro-arena, and so far has largely failed to give us positive laws in the macro-arena.

It seems as though we have to settle for compromises: namely, fuzzy laws and model empiricism. And these philosophies of science provide the reams of theory that you mentioned, each theory providing support for one of the worldviews or the other. Notions of rational choice theory for the “evolutionists”, and things like the iron law of oligarchy for the “intentionists”, for instance.

As in all of science, the key to deciding which one is correct in a particular case is to draw out some of the observable implications of one model over the other. What can we expect about case so-and-so if the evolutionist story is correct? What can we expect if the intentionalist’s story is correct?

It’s not immediately obvious what the empirical implications for either are. And (for the sake of argument) if there weren’t any, then there’d be no getting around these dogmatic “ideal” worldviews to provide us with the toy models that we need to explain our way through evidence. What do you think, Hanno? Your experience must be able to shed some light on this.

Of course, both theories seem wrong to the naturalist, since both seem to ignore the role of opportunities in one’s free choices. The evolutionist (as she has been presented here) makes the idea of coercion impossible, because the opportunity to do otherwise is taken for granted. [Though I must admit that this is a very strange thing to say, seeing that while ostensible right-libertarians would be the ones making the argument in favor of trusts, they would at the same time would need the notion of coercion to make their anti-state moral arguments.] The intentionist on the other hand seems to take it for granted that the opportunities to do otherwise always float around zero.