"The fact that an increasing number of social scientists confine themselves to the study of what exists in some part of the social system does not make their results more realistic, but makes them largely irrelevant for most decisions about the future. Fruitful social science must be very largely a study of what is not: a construction of hypothetical models of possible worlds which might exist if some of the alterable conditions were made different. We need a scientific theory chiefly to tell us what would be the effects if some conditions were as they have never been before. All scientific knowledge is knowledge not of particular facts but of hypotheses which have so far withstood systematic attempts at refuting them."
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Law, Legislation and Liberty
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