Oddly Influenced

This is a blog post I’ve resurrected from just over 20 years ago.

Wikipedia credits C.S.

“The Doctrine of Chances,” published March 1878, is the third installment of C.S.

This is a rewriting of C.S.

This is a rewriting of C.S.

C.S.

I changed my Mastodon profile picture to a Canadian flag today.

C.S.

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 made a mistake in the previous post.

An instrumental theory is one that makes accurate predictions but doesn’t explain the link between cause and effect.

The critical rationalists disliked post-1925 quantum mechanics (QM) as much or more than they disliked Marxism.

It’s time – past time – to wrap this up.

⊕ The image is of Alexander the Great.

Methodologies tell people how to do things: they describe steps in a process.

The critical rationalists have the intellectual habits of philosophers.

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.

In the last century, the critical rationalists laid out influential rules for how scientists should update or replace theories.

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.

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.

According to Lakatos, Marxism predicted “the absolute impoverishment of the working class,” which didn’t happen.

Like any methodology, critical rationalism (described in the previous post) has blind spots.

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.

My next post is scheduled to be on Imre Lakatos’s “methodology of scientific research programmes.”

The recent death of Tom Stoppard, who cowrote the screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love,” reminded me of Dennis Overby’s Einstein in Love (2000).

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.”

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.

An occasional controversy in science is whether some theoretical “entity” is really real, or just a mathematical/modeling convenience.

Human beans love thinking in binary oppositions.