Scientific explanation is often imagined as a progressive smoothing of difficulty. Better data, better models, better theories — and the rough edges are expected to disappear. Disagreement, affect, and resistance are treated as temporary artefacts of incomplete knowledge or social interference.
This series begins from a different observation: some forms of resistance do not disappear with explanatory success — they intensify.
Explanation as Stabilisation
To explain is to stabilise.
Every scientific explanation performs a necessary act of construal:
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it selects a unit,
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fixes a level,
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foregrounds certain relations,
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suppresses others.
Without this stabilisation, explanation cannot proceed. There would be no variables, no laws, no mechanisms — only an undifferentiated field. Explanation depends on cuts.
But these cuts are never exhaustive.
When Success Generates Resistance
In many scientific domains, the most intense disagreement does not occur at the margins of failure, but at the centre of success:
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Quantum theory predicts with unmatched precision — yet provokes foundational unrest.
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Evolutionary biology explains diversity and adaptation — yet generates persistent disputes over units, levels, and determinism.
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Neuroscience maps mechanisms — yet confronts irreducible phenomenality.
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Economics models rational agents — yet encounters systematic deviation.
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Artificial intelligence optimises behaviour — yet unsettles concepts of agency, meaning, and responsibility.
In each case, the better the explanation works, the sharper the resistance becomes.
This is not accidental.
Intolerance as Structural Phenomenon
This series treats intolerance not as error, ignorance, or bad faith, but as a structural signal.
Intolerance appears when:
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an explanatory cut is treated as final,
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a stabilised unit is mistaken for an ontological primitive,
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a perspective is naturalised as reality itself.
What is resisted is not explanation, but closure — the foreclosure of relational possibilities that the cut cannot accommodate.
Anger, polemic, and conceptual revolt mark the point where the field exceeds the form.
Relational Diagnosis
Across disciplines, the same pattern recurs:
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A field of constrained possibility.
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A necessary explanatory cut.
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Formal success.
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Suppression of relations.
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Resistance and intolerance.
This series does not seek to adjudicate between competing theories, nor to offer a higher-order synthesis that resolves disagreement. Its task is diagnostic rather than reconciliatory.
The aim is to ask, repeatedly and carefully:
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What has been stabilised here?
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What relations have been suppressed?
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What form of intolerance has emerged as a result?
Beyond Error and Ideology
By reading intolerance structurally, long-standing scientific disputes can be seen in a different light:
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Not as battles between truth and falsehood.
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Not as conflicts between progress and obstruction.
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But as pressure points where explanation meets its limits.
The persistence of these conflicts is not a sign that science has failed, but that it has reached regions where relational excess cannot be neatly contained.
What This Series Will Do
The posts that follow will move across scientific domains, tracing how different explanatory strategies generate different forms of intolerance:
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intolerance of determinism,
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intolerance of reduction,
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intolerance of unitary explanation,
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intolerance of scale,
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intolerance of perspective,
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intolerance of incompleteness.
Each will be treated not as a pathology, but as an intelligible response to the demands and costs of explanation.
The Work Ahead
Scientific explanation does not eliminate the field of possibility; it cuts into it. The discomfort that follows is not a problem to be solved, but a phenomenon to be understood.
This series takes that discomfort seriously — not in order to dissolve it, but to read it.
What follows is not a critique of science, but an exploration of the pressures that make science possible at all.
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