Abstract
The purpose of this article is to argue the relevance and the limit of evolutionary game theory when it applied to social sciences. The difference between the classic game theory and the evolutionary one is that the former hypothesizes players as rational actors, but the latter doesn't. This makes up the validity and also the limit of the application of the evolutionary game theory. On the one hand it points out the weakness of social sciences, its staticism, its lack of deducibility or so, and will be expected to strengthen the points. On the other hand, however, the crude application to the social sciences will be claimed to lead us to some difficulties as follow: (1)There is a positivity problem that the main theme of social sciences is never positivistic, so the conception of positivity in social sciences must be modified into alternative one. (2)The facilities of the application are not enough to handle the concept of institutions, because the concept lays on the other level of positivity. (3)The application seems to loose the way of reasoning that is adopted in social sciences, because the treatment of rationality is not clearly hypothetical.
