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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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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