Evidence versus interpretation
A story Karl Popper told in his “Conjectures and Refutations” tells of the intellectual excitement that gripped Vienna in the wake of the post WWI collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Theories, ideas and revolutionary slogans clashed with each other in a stimulating torrent of intellect. Four theories were among those holding prominence; they were Einstein’s theory of relativity, Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler’s so-called ‘individual psychology.’
The young teenaged Popper (born in July 1902) had friends impressed by the apparent explanatory power of the theories of Marx, Freud and Adler. Popper wrote that to his friends “these theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred.”
Popper relates a personal experience when he had barely turned 17, yet confronted the great Alfred Adler with a case that didn’t seem to fit. Popper reports that nonetheless,
“He found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. ‘Because of my thousand-fold experience,’ he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: ‘And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.’”
Popper spotted that Adler’s theory, like those of Marx and Freud could explain everything because it expressed nothing more than a determination to interpret events in a preconceived way. Because of this there was nothing that could disprove these theories. Everything that happened could be accommodated within them as further ‘proof’ of their universality.
He realized that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was different. It had predicted that during the total eclipse of 1919, two stars near the sun would not be in their expected positions because, if he were right, their light would have been bent by gravity. A team was sent out to observe, and found that the stars were where Einstein had predicted. But he could have been wrong. Einstein’s theory lived dangerously by predicting observations that could have gone otherwise, but the theories of Marx, Freud and Adler did not.
The observed world we experience can lead us to retain, modify, or discard theories according to their abilities to predict what will be observed. This is how scientific progress is made. It might comfort some people to hold to theories that interpret events along preconceived lines, but these theories are by no means scientific, even though their protagonists might talk about the “sciences” of history, society and behaviour. They belong in a separate compartment to that of science.
Into that non-scientific compartment goes Critical Race Theory, along with the other theories that tell us more about the person holding them than they do about the world beyond them.