C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) was a logician, scientist, mathematician, and philosopher who was relatively unknown and under-published until well after he died. (But Bertrand Russell later wrote “he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever.") Peirce (pronounced “purse”) is most known for inventing philosophical…
The title plays on “ Last Song About Satan ” by Slim Cessna’s Auto Club , a country-rock band credited as a founder of the “ gothic country ” genre (“a genre of country music rooted in early jazz, gospel, Americana, gothic rock, and post-punk.") I don’t think of Popper or the critical rationalists as satanic, but I do resonate with the theme of the song as…
I made a mistake in the previous post . However, in true pundit style, I claim the correction just reinforces what I’ve been saying all along. (What’re the odds?!) Correcting the mistake reveals a methodologist who looks at unfinished work and makes a judgment due to bias, bias unchallenged by his own methodology. That happens a lot with methodologists. At least, so it seems to me. ⊕…
An instrumental theory is one that makes accurate predictions but doesn’t explain the link between cause and effect. Many philosophers and some scientists dislike instrumental theories. I’ll give four examples of instrumental theories and conclude that lack of causal explanations isn’t a good reason to discard a theory. I’ll suggest a better criterion. (Plot twist: Lakatos…
The critical rationalists disliked post-1925 quantum mechanics (QM) as much or more than they disliked Marxism . It’s not that QM wasn’t successful when judged against their methodology. It was. Theorists made dramatic predictions that matched later experimental results to an absurd degree of precision. Check. Anomalies were handled by adjusting or expanding the theory in ways that…
It’s time – past time – to wrap this up. I’ve been focused on the question of why critical rationalist methodology didn’t prevent its proponents from making confident proclamations that were wrong . I’ve concentrated on matters of personality, habit, and bias that, to put it charitably, directed their attention away from important facts and classes of facts. In this post,…
⊕ The image is of Alexander the Great . He won a lot of battles, aided by other soldiers, most notably his heavy cavalry ( the Companions ). The critical rationalists are like historians who focus on the Great Men of history. When they see the history of science, they see the Alexander-equivalents – the Newtons, the Einsteins. They are uninterested in the common soldiers, and mostly uninterested…
Methodologies tell people how to do things: they describe steps in a process. A useful rule of thumb is that gotchas for a methodology cluster around the steps the methodologists aren’t interested in. The critical rationalists aren’t interested in experiments. They are Big Design Up Front , Command and Control people, and their methodology suffers because of it. ⊕ About this series My…
The critical rationalists have the intellectual habits of philosophers. That biases their judgment of science and gives them a blinkered perspective on what scientists should be doing. In this post: conflict as the path to truth confidence. ⊕ About this series Sociologist Randall Collins provides the epigraph for this post: The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change ,…
If you’re one of those new-fangled believers in introspection , a good mental discipline is to ask if – how – your habits of thought predispose you to notice certain evidence and ignore other types. The next set of posts will use the critical rationalists for case studies. Each will describe a habit they seem to exhibit, then link it to one or more blind spots. You may have similar habits…
In the last century, the critical rationalists laid out influential rules for how scientists should update or replace theories. As an example of bad behavior, they used the Marxists' reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1917. But their intellectual history of the period from 1848 to ~1925 was comically incomplete. Last time , I added more about what Marxists actually claimed and how they actually…
As I’ve been documenting , philosophers of science Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos had harsh things to say about Marxists' response to the Russian Revolution of 1917 . I think they were wrong, and wrong because they missed important changes to Marxist theory. I have a teensy suspicion that not many of my readers will care about developments in Marxism between 1848 and 1917 and in the aftermath…
Structuralism was an intellectual movement most active a couple of decades after World War II, but I think it’s something people with a certain intellectual temperament gravitate to. I certainly did when I was younger, though I no longer do. I need a short summary of it that I can refer to. I could just drop a link to Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , but I want to…
According to Lakatos, Marxism predicted “the absolute impoverishment of the working class,” which didn’t happen. Marxists didn’t admit the mistake, kludged up some excuse, and moved on. See the previous post . I think the story is more complicated, and it’s an example of how critical rationalists think experiments (natural or otherwise) and theories are way simpler…
Like any methodology, critical rationalism (described in the previous post ) has blind spots. Karl Popper’s and Imre Lakatos’s criticisms of Marxism cast those blind spots into high relief. Each of the next two posts will look at one of their claims that Marxism made specific predictions (as a science should) but handled falsifications wrongly (unscientifically). Thus, they claim,…
Given my goal for this series, I knew I’d have to explain more about the rules Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos think scientists should follow to be worthy of the name. Rather than smear the content throughout other posts, I’ve decided to put it all – well, most – in one place. I’ve organized the post around the kind of running example I’ve wished my authors had given. They…
My next post is scheduled to be on Imre Lakatos’s “methodology of scientific research programmes.” I’m going to cast it as a failed attempt to make science rational that’s actually a good dissection of how scientists and people with a scientific temperament are persuaded (not-necessarily-rationally) to make big career bets. But the question of why Lakatos was fixated…
The recent death of Tom Stoppard , who cowrote the screenplay for “ Shakespeare in Love ,” reminded me of Dennis Overby ’s Einstein in Love (2000). It’s a biography of Einstein during the two decades of his most groundbreaking work. In it, I found out that Eddington fudged the results of the famous experiment that was reported to have confirmed general relativity . Three…
In late 1906, William James gave a series of lectures on the topic of a newly coalesced philosophical approach that had come to be known as “pragmatism.” His second lecture was titled “ What Pragmatism Means .” It starts with a story that illustrates what you might call the “pragmatic temperament.” I try to have that temperament myself. SOME YEARS AGO, being…
I am, by nature and upbringing, dogmatic, but I fell in among bad companions earlier in my life – Lisp and Smalltalk programmers, certain philosophers of science, and the American Pragmatist philosophers. They made me better at my job of a software consultant. Something that really struck me, way back when, was part of the Introduction to Richard Rorty ’s Consequences of Pragmatism . I offer…
An occasional controversy in science is whether some theoretical “entity” is really real, or just a mathematical/modeling convenience. Ian Hacking has an interesting and eminently pragmatic answer that goes under the name “entity realism.” I believe him. The positron (positively charged electron) was originally theorized by Paul Dirac as an implication of Dirac equation ,…
Human beans love thinking in binary oppositions. That is often way too crude for serious understanding and problem-solving. I offer a complex visual metaphor that might help you and others push against the binary reflex. Reminders A number of years ago, I made some “An Example Would Be Handy Right About Now” stickers. ⊕ They were a punchy way of shifting a conversation that was going…
Sometimes the answer to “is X true or false?” can only be a shrug. The answer might be unknowable, or perhaps unknowable without an impractical amount of work. Jaina seven-valued logic offers an interesting perspective on (or alternative to) the problem. Consider the halting problem in computer science. The question is: “Can you write a program Oracle that takes any other program…
A Zettelkasten is a particular sort of hypertext document as well as a technique for creating it. My aim in this post is to give you an understanding of a Zettelkasten document – its parts and its whole – and, more importantly, show something of what it’s like to work with a Zettelkasten. A Zettelkasten will appeal to some people much more than to others, and I’d like you to be able to…
Back in 2002, I published an article about how people learn “tacit knowledge,” using as an example how students of veterinary medicine learn a diagnostic category. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from that example over the years (in speeches and such), and I’d like to update the article, because there were some aspects I missed back then. The topic Veterinarians like to…