Judging the truth of a big theory can be hard. but one tool that helps is the “brute fact” criterion:
You should increase your confidence in a theory if it conforms to some big and obvious facts. Downgrade theories that reject big and obvious facts.
That isn’t the entirety of the story. For example, you can reject a theory if it can explain a big fact but gets lots of little facts wrong. Still, the brute fact criterion has its uses.
I was discussing ideologies with a philosophy student, and we got to the topic of flat earth theory. People laugh at flat earthers, but they have the brute fact criterion on their side: when you look at the earth, it looks flat. You have to deal with that brute fact.
The issue with flat earth theory is that you have to do some hard mental work to figure out it’s wrong. For example, if you closely look at sailing ships, they sink under the horizon. Or, you could build a spaceship and then you will see the earth is a ball. The Greek’s figured it out by comparing shadows made at the same time but in different places. Clever. The lesson is that flat earth theory is wrong, but it has some face plausibility due to a brute fact and it’s hard to figure out why it’s wrong.
Now let’s turn to Marxism. I think in 1850’s Europe it has some brute facts going for it. First, there was a wave of industrialization where masses of people worked for factory owners. Second, there were class-based conflicts in Europe, such as the Paris uprisings. The brute fact of 19th century Europe might lead one to develop a theory that society was really about class-based conflict and maybe one day, the workers would prevail.
Of course, you could critique Marxism from the point of view of the 19th century and many did. But let’s focus on today. The brute facts that motivated Marx in the mid 1800s are gone. The workers never took over Western capitalist nations, we’ve seen de-industrialization, and poverty rates have dropped in countries with liberalized markets.
The modern Marxist has a real problem - the brute facts have changed. Modern life is actually comfortable and nice for huge numbers of people. The Marxist preaches gloom, but modern society is boom.
If you are familiar with Marxist theory, you know that there are additional theories that are meant to explain away brute facts. For example, to explain the absence of the worker’s revolution, Marxists invoke ideas like “late-stage capitalism.” To show you that material discomfort is a distraction, Marxists invoke theories of ideology. The takeaway is that to believe the standard version of Marxism, you need to buy an additional pile of theories, each of which is equally tough to believe.
In the end, I think flat earth theory and Marxism are both wrong, but you have to work harder to see why flat earth theory is wrong - and that should tell you something.
Bottom line: In the game of plausibility, Flat Earth 1, Socialist Revolution 0.
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