The Classical Logic Assumption

This paper identifies an unspoken assumption underlying modern scientific epistemology: that the systems under investigation conform to classical logic, and that their properties can therefore be expressed in binary categories of truth and falsity. I call this the Classical Logic Assumption (CLA) and show that Popper's falsifiability criterion is conditionally correct — it functions in stable, non-reflexive systems where the CLA holds, but fails in domains whose ontology departs from classical logic. Social systems, I argue, exhibit structural properties of paraconsistency, fuzziness, and reflexivity as normal features of their ontology — not as defects to be corrected. I address the modular-cognition objection: that apparent contradictions in social systems are reducible to classical logic plus a theory of contexts. I show that this objection succeeds at the level of individual cognition but fails at the level of institutional and inter-individual social reality, and that the two accounts make divergent empirical predictions. As a consequence, many canonical 'anomalies' in the social sciences — the replication crisis, the ubiquity of apparent irrationality, the instability of social laws — should be understood as epistemic artifacts produced by a mismatch between the investigative apparatus and the ontological structure of the object. The paper concludes with a sketch of a post-classical epistemology for social science, including a concrete account of what weak but genuine empirical testing looks like in a non-CLA domain. The argument is presented as a contribution to the tradition of social constructivism — completing what Berger and Luckmann, Durkheim, and Geertz described from the outside by specifying the logical structure of the construction process itself. The argument is intentionally strong: it proposes not a local methodological correction, but a structural diagnosis of the epistemological foundations of social science.