Over at Alan Jacobs’ Tumblr (which should be mandatory reading for all of you), he quotes an interesting argument by Karl Popper in opposition to the possibility of developing a theory of historical development. Here’s Popper’s argument in full:
I propose to give here, in a few words, an outline refutation of historicism. The argument may be summed up in five statements, as follows.
1. The course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge. The truth of this premise must be admitted even by those who see in our ideas, including scientific ideas, merely the by-products of material developments of some kind or another.
2. We cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our knowledge.
3. We cannot, therefore, predict the future course of human history.
4. This means that we must reject the possibility of a theoretical history; that is to say, of a historical social science that would correspond to theoretical physics. There can be no scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis for historical prediction.
5. The fundamental aim of historicist methods is therefore misconceived; and historicism
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This ignores nonlocal entanglement signals from the future that allow us, albeit in very limited situations, to know the future rather than to predict it. Problem is to know that one is seeing a real future and not an imagined one. Usually, we have to wait for the actual future happening so we can't use it to our advantage. This may not always be the case. For example, Russell Targ says he made money on the silver market using precognitive remote viewing. Targ was one of the main CIA funded physicists at Stanford Research Institute investigating this phenomenon. - Jack Sarfatti in London W8 April 12, 2012