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 captured here:

Well, I must’ve gone back in time
About the time after Jesus died
He was down there preaching in that hole
To all us dark and lonely souls
And He said “Son, why are you here?
You should be back home drinking beer
Writing songs about God and glory
Don’t use the Devil in your story”

[Chorus]
Well, this is my last song about Satan
No more songs about evil or filth or bile and booze
No more songs about my hell, I’ve nothing left to prove

I could say more about reasons why critical rationalism is a bad methodology of science – you should see my notes – but any remaining readers (hi!) are either convinced or not.

So I’ll finish with three narratives of discovery: C.S. Peirce’s account of Kepler’s discovery of his three laws of planetary motion, Imre Lakatos’s account of Newton’s theory of gravitation, and Andrew Pickering’s story of Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions. I’ll (mostly) just let the richness and… plausibility of the first and third accounts contrast with the narrowness of the second, and (mostly) just let you sit with the question of which of the three narrators seems more likely to have insight into my original question: why does science work so well?

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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.

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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 was right!)

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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 allowed new predictions that, in due time, survived attempts at refutation. Check. So the critical rationalists should have been happy, but they weren’t.

What’s the problem? In a word, it’s that QM is an instrumental theory, and those are the wrong kind of theories. In a draft of the final essay in this series, I used QM to explain instrumentalism, but then I thought of a better (or, at least, cuter and shorter) example.

Still, the QM story is interesting, so I present it as an optional supplement. As Abraham Lincoln didn’t actually say (of course), “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.” It is in that spirit that I offer these words to you.

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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, I’ll use an analogy from a reader to argue that the methodology is fundamentally too incomplete to be workable. I claim that even someone with the purest of intentions, best intuition, highest intelligence, greatest imagination, and best work ethic could not follow critical rationalism and contribute to the growth of science.

Attempts to apply critical rationalism outside science will fare no better.

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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 in the scientific equivalent of the Companions. They do not see the full mosaic with all its participants:

Thus – like Great Man historians – they miss a lot.

About this series – Sorry there’s no picture of Mt. Fuji, but the images above were too good not to use.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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