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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 devices at two locations measured the deflection of stars near the sun during a solar eclipse.

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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.

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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 it to you, with a little light commentary.

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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.

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