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.
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.
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 and similar blind spots. I do.
Some psychologizing is inevitable, which the critical rationalists would hate. Oh well.
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 behaved.
But it’s still possible the critical rationalists came to a correct conclusion for invalid reasons. Given my more complete history, do I nevertheless agree Marxist theorists behaved badly?
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 of the revolution, so I’ll separate that history out here.
Forthcoming:
Popper and Lakatos said their fictional history showed Marxist theoreticians breaking the rules of critical rationalism, their “methodology of scientific research programmes.” What does a more accurate history show?
Is there something about their methodology that biased them toward disregarding parts of the reality?
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 highlight certain features that are important to how I think of it.
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 than they actually are. As a result, their methodology (rule book) for science misleads.
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, Marxism started out as a science but degenerated into a pseudoscience.
This post provides background for the next two.
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 concentrate so much on justifying their rules that they explain them only in bits and pieces, not as a coherent whole.
This is a toy example, but I think it’s still useful.
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 on rationality makes for a good story. That’s this post.