There is a familiar way of speaking about theories going wrong. We talk about errors, mistakes, false assumptions, incorrect predictions. In this register, a theory fails because it gets something wrong about the world, and the remedy is straightforward in principle: correct the mistake, gather better data, refine the model.
What we want to isolate in this series is something quite different.
A theoretical pathology is not a simple error. It is a mode of theoretical activity that can persist, stabilise, and even flourish independently of its relation to any phenomenon. Pathological theories do not fail loudly. They succeed — institutionally, rhetorically, mathematically — while quietly losing contact with the conditions that once gave theory its point.
This distinction matters, because most contemporary debates in physics (and beyond) are conducted as if the only possible failure mode were being wrong. What goes largely unexamined is the possibility that a theory may be internally sophisticated, mathematically fertile, aesthetically compelling — and yet no longer function as a theory of anything.
Error versus pathology
An error is corrigible from within the theoretical frame that produced it. A pathology is not.
Errors presuppose a healthy background:
a distinction between theory and its instances,
criteria for when a theory is doing explanatory work,
and some grip, however indirect, on what would count as success or failure.
Pathologies arise when those background distinctions erode. Once that happens, the theory acquires a peculiar resilience. Criticism no longer bites, because the very terms in which criticism would be formulated have become unstable or ambiguous.
This is why pathological theories so often provoke frustration rather than straightforward refutation. One points out the absence of empirical traction, and is answered with appeals to mathematical depth. One questions explanatory relevance, and is met with aesthetic virtues. One asks what, exactly, has been predicted, and receives a redefinition of prediction.
Nothing is incorrect in any local sense — and yet something has gone deeply wrong.
Success without contact
A central feature of theoretical pathology is what we will call surrogate success.
Surrogate success occurs when indicators that once tracked contact with phenomena come to operate autonomously. Mathematical consistency, unification, elegance, internal necessity, even interpretative richness begin to function as stand-ins for instantiation.
The theory continues to grow. Papers are written, techniques refined, careers built. From within the practice, it feels like progress. From outside, it can look like extraordinary sophistication. What is missing is not intelligence or rigour, but a live relation between theory and event.
Importantly, this is not fraud, delusion, or bad faith. Pathologies are collective achievements. They emerge gradually, through perfectly respectable local moves, each of which makes sense given the last. Their danger lies precisely in the fact that no single step looks illegitimate.
Why physics?
Although this series will range more widely, physics provides unusually clear examples of theoretical pathology.
This is not because physicists are uniquely prone to error, but because modern physics has been spectacularly successful. The mathematical turn inaugurated in the early twentieth century delivered genuine explanatory and predictive power on an unprecedented scale. That success altered the internal economy of theory itself.
Once mathematics proved capable of reaching beyond ordinary intuition, it also became possible — tempting, even — to let mathematics replace intuition altogether. Theoretical fertility began to decouple from phenomenological constraint. In some domains, this decoupling was temporary and productive. In others, it hardened into a new normal.
The result is a landscape in which it is no longer obvious what counts as a theory’s point of contact with the world, or whether such contact is even required.
Pathology is structural, not sociological
It is tempting to explain these developments in terms of incentives, funding structures, academic politics, or prestige economies. While all of these play a role, they are not the core of the problem.
Theoretical pathologies are structural. They arise from the internal organisation of theory-making itself — from how distinctions are drawn, how success is recognised, and how meanings drift as practices evolve.
This is why similar patterns recur across very different fields: cosmology, quantum foundations, economics, climate modelling, cognitive science. The surface details differ, but the underlying dynamics rhyme.
What this series will do
The aim of this series is not to adjudicate between rival theories, nor to propose a new methodological rulebook. Instead, it will:
identify recurring pathological patterns in contemporary theory-building;
show how these patterns stabilise themselves linguistically and mathematically;
and make visible the moments where a theory quietly ceases to be about anything at all.
In later parts, we will draw on earlier discussions — particularly When Physicists Talk About Reality and Relational Cuts in Modern Physics — to show how these pathologies arise, why they persist, and what would be required to escape them.
For now, the point is simpler: before we can ask whether a theory is right or wrong, we must be able to ask a prior question — whether it is still functioning as a theory rather than as a self-contained symbolic practice.
That question, remarkably, is no longer easy to ask.
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