Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each feature: does it make a theory testable or unfalsifiable?
Groups: Makes it testable · Makes it unfalsifiable
- States a mechanism that could be checked against cases
- Rests on an analogy with no stated mechanism
- Specifies the domain where it should apply
- States a tempo the cycle should run at
Hints
- Testability requires a named variable and a stated domain.
- Organic metaphors about civilisations resist any check.
Show the answer
Makes it testable: States a mechanism that could be checked against cases, States a tempo the cycle should run at, Specifies the domain where it should apply
Makes it unfalsifiable: Rests on an analogy with no stated mechanism
Why
The left column is Ibn Khaldun; the right is Spengler and much of Toynbee. The difference between social science and sweeping poetry is whether the thing could ever be wrong.
Practise Cyclical Theories of History
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Cyclical Theories of History
- What makes Ibn Khaldun’s cycle a genuine model rather than a metaphor?
- Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyyah rises in the desert and decays in the city over about four generations. Why does that…
- Put Ibn Khaldun’s dynastic cycle in order.
- Cyclical theories of history become popular during periods of perceived decline. What methodological warning…
- For Toynbee, a civilization grows best when its challenge is as severe as possible.
- Match each theorist to their signature and their flaw.