1. Thanks go to the Austrian Ministry of Social Affairs (Ludwig Flaschberger, Franz Schmitzberger) and to the Austrian Ministry of Education (Herbert Pelzelmayer) which, with an unusual propensity for risky and potentially innovative research designs, opened up the possibilities for a detailled systems dynamics exploration into the fields of employment and education. Thanks go also to Adelheid Fraiji and to Lorenz Lassnigg at the Institute for Advanced Studies, whose collaboration in various stages of the data collection process and in the theoretical perspectives on the relations between education and employment proved to be indispensable.
2. G. Boole (1958), An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. New York, 20f
3. Boole stresses the observer—dependence in the construction and application of formalized methods in a very clear—cut and surprisingly modern fashion: It is the ability inherent in our nature to appreciate Order, and the concurrent presumption, however founded, that the phenomena of Nature are connected by a principle of Order.(Ibid., 403)
4. 10n this term see esp. L. Laudan (1977), Progress and Its Problems. Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth. University of California Press, 66ff.
5. It remains an interesting phenomenon, though, that even after roughly 150 years of institutionalization in the social sciences, the notions of evidence and supportive evidence remain astonishingly weak and undecisive. On this point see, e.g. the Presidential Adress by Stanley Lieberson, in: S. Lieberson (1992), “Einstein, Renoir, and Greeley: Some Thoughts about Evidence in Sociology”, in: American Sociological Review 57, 1 — 15.