The politics of embarrassment

How Lakatos anticipated science's culture war

In 1973, philosopher of science Imre Lakatos did something we find difficult these days. He gave his enemies a chance. “Stay ahead of reality,” as he put it, and he would accept them as scientific. Fall behind, and he would call them pseudoscience. He applied this to all schools of thought, including political ones. It is a simple concept. Name the point at which you will abandon your beliefs in advance; make predictions that come true.

His essay, “Science and Pseudoscience,” was not only scientific. It was about the connection between science and politics. By encompassing both, and emphasizing how important it was to demand “progression” and reject “degeneration,” in public life, Lakatos anticipated culture war battles today.

The problem of the demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not merely a problem of armchair philosophy: it is of vital social and political relevance. — Imre Lakatos

It’s safe to say we didn’t listen. In American politics, the tiniest whiffs of Lakatosianism, like reluctantly saying the other side has a good point, are scarce. Let alone “I was wrong.” Instead of daring our scientific and political enemies to test their theories, we attempt to do so much reputational harm that they never get the chance.

Science, politicians, and many institutions, notably journalism and higher education continue to erode public trust for this exact reason. They have rigged the game so they can never be wrong. Once a scientist or politician makes it into the public eye, they’re not going to let reality get in the way. Normal people know this because it’s simple, and because they’ve observed it countless times in other normal people and in public life.

Lakatos was a great philosopher. His ideas are relevant to pure science and particularly to the replication crisis that defines the modern era of science and has now slipped into politics.

But Lakatos’ life also underscores how great a grace he was offering his foes. His family was killed by the Nazis. Having become an ardent, even extreme Marxist, he was eventually tortured and expelled by Marxists for “revisionism.”

To be fair, Lakatos didn’t think Marxists (or Nazis) would pass his test. (He didn’t think Freudians would either, a prediction that has also held.) His offer was a challenge. It was a way of excluding movements from public life that were gaming the system, but he didn't shun his opponents. He gave them terms for peace.

Today, at least in the United States, such suffering, let alone a peace offer to people who have caused you personal and bodily harm, is rare. Polarization persists. We’re busy burning everything so the other side can't have it, including principles of thought and thereby anything that could bring us back together. The political and scientific theory of the day is that soon everyone on the other side will be expunged, or forced to recant under threat of global online humiliation.

20th century philosophy of science

Like the early 21st century, the early 20th century was a time of upheaval, both scientifically and politically. From the 1910s to the 1970s when Lakatos was writing, philosophers of science were struggling to generalize about science in a way that accounted for Einstein having so suddenly turned it upside down. Lakatos landed in a position between the more absolute Popper, and the more relativistic Kuhn.

What connected all three philosophers was a narrative since the Enlightenment that science had steadily advanced, but it was difficult to say how. Leaps forward were impossible to predict (Kuhn) and impossible to say are “forward” (Popper). Einstein showed that Newton was right about methodically asking questions of nature, but that Newton’s physics was, shockingly, wrong. It was so shocking that science and philosophy took a half-century to recover.

Unscientific research programs don’t make predictions that can be proven false — and, Lakatos thought, they don’t make predictions that come true. They particularly don’t say things that others can use to make predictions on their behalf as Einstein did. Lakatos believed that political movements and research programs had to progress by making predictions.

This is not to say that political movements need to become soothsayers or stock market analysts. Predictions are a way of keeping each other honest, as the arrow of time is agreed to go in one direction.

With this, Lakatos gave the world a mental model of successful scientific research programs, and belief systems in general. There’s a “hard core” to a belief system that makes, or implies, predictions about the future, and there’s a “protective belt” that gives the system a little wiggle room that accounts for all kinds of incidental error and false accusation.

It is, of course, cheating to design a belief system to be irrefutable, either with an unfalsifiable core, or a protective belt that makes the core impervious by definition. Whether the core falls to criticism is mediated by nature, not semantics or weaseling out of predictions post hoc.

The research programs Lakatos focused on in his essay were never settled in the 50 years since, which may indicate human beings’ inability to follow through and admit fault. However, the truth of what he said is more apparent than ever. It is of vital importance to specify in advance what the terms of peace are with your intellectual and political rivals. If you know your rivals will be proven wrong, all the better. You will have done the right thing and won the argument too.

Part II: Examples

There are two culture war battles that exemplify degenerating schools of thought: the far left contingent of metascience, and the fight for metascience’s traditional rival, the universities. I will argue that the left wing of metascience is far left compared to the general public, obviously political rather than scientific, and has drawn the movement into certain contradiction and no possibility of peace with either non-political metascientists or administrations to their political right. This will only prove successful if reality has a really strong leftward bias, which even they admit isn’t likely given their invocation of the millions killed by Lysenkoism.

On universities, two authors who have been critical of the far left, Sam Harris and Jonathan Rauch have recently come to higher education’s defense without mentioning the replication crisis, which is a convenient rhetorical opportunity to declare the fight to save universities is degenerating. The reason can be stated in one sentence: no one, even their political critics, will name a point at which the universities have slipped too far into irreproducibility.

Both the existing metascience movement and universities are threatened by a very specific person, Donald Trump, who does not represent any kind of scientific or Lakatosian ideal and doesn’t strive in that direction. However, focusing on him is shortsighted. The problem is bigger than he is. The problem these institutions face is that normal people can tell they are wrong.

Part II continues next week.