Once the cut between theory and instance has eroded, a further transformation becomes possible. Indicators that once tracked a theory’s contact with phenomena are freed from that role and begin to function autonomously.
This is the mechanism I will call surrogate success.
Surrogate success occurs when a theory continues to register achievement, progress, and legitimacy even as its relation to events becomes indeterminate or absent. The theory does not stall. It accelerates. What changes is the basis on which success is recognised.
From constraint to credential
In healthy theory-building, certain properties function as constraints. Mathematical consistency limits what can be said. Explanatory coherence restricts which claims can be made together. Predictive accuracy ties the theory back to events.
In pathological contexts, these same properties are retooled as credentials.
Consistency becomes a mark of depth rather than a minimum requirement. Unification becomes a value in its own right rather than a consequence of explanatory reach. Mathematical fertility becomes evidence that a theory is “on the right track,” regardless of whether that track leads anywhere.
What once limited theory now licenses it.
Internal goods and external silence
Surrogate success is sustained by the proliferation of what might be called internal goods.
A theory begins to generate:
technically demanding problems,
elegant reformulations,
surprising internal connections,
novel mathematical objects,
and increasingly refined specialised expertise.
These are genuine achievements. They require intelligence, discipline, and creativity. What they no longer require is contact with phenomena.
As long as the internal economy of the theory remains productive, the absence of external constraint can fade from view. Silence from the world is no longer heard as resistance; it is reinterpreted as depth.
Progress without risk
One of the clearest signatures of surrogate success is the disappearance of epistemic risk.
In a non-pathological theory, progress is fragile. New claims expose the theory to possible failure. Predictions can miss. Explanations can be undermined by recalcitrant events. Advancement always carries the possibility of loss.
Under surrogate success, progress becomes risk-free. There is no clear way for the theory to be wrong, because there is no agreed site at which wrongness could appear. Developments accumulate without threatening the core commitments of the framework.
This produces a distinctive confidence. The theory feels inevitable. Retreat begins to look irrational, even unscientific.
Replacing contact with consensus
As phenomenological constraint weakens, consensus takes on a new role.
Agreement among experts begins to stand in for contact with the world. If a sufficiently sophisticated community converges on a framework, this convergence itself is treated as evidence that the theory is sound. Disagreement is pathologised as ignorance, lack of training, or resistance to abstraction.
The theory no longer answers primarily to events. It answers to itself.
This is not because physicists have stopped caring about reality. It is because the markers of reality have been quietly displaced by markers of professional competence.
Why surrogate success feels like success
Surrogate success is persuasive because it mimics genuine theoretical achievement.
It produces real understanding — of formalisms, structures, and internal relations. It rewards mastery and insight. It supports long-term research programmes and coherent training pathways. From within the practice, it feels indistinguishable from progress.
This is why appeals to “lack of evidence” so often fail to persuade. They target what looks, from inside the framework, like a secondary or premature concern. The theory is not finished yet. Its internal story is still unfolding.
But without the cut, there is no principled point at which finishing would require encountering the world.
From surrogate to substitute
At its most advanced stage, surrogate success no longer merely stands in for instantiation — it replaces it.
The question “what phenomena does this theory account for?” is supplanted by questions such as:
how elegant is the framework?
how much does it unify?
how deeply does it constrain itself?
how much mathematics does it organise?
These are not illegitimate questions. They become pathological only when they are allowed to do the work that phenomena once did.
The theory has not been shown to succeed. It has been allowed to count as successful.
Looking ahead
Surrogate success is not an accidental by-product of modern theory-making. It is the natural consequence of losing the theory–instance cut.
In the next part, I will examine how aesthetic values — elegance, beauty, naturalness — migrate into epistemic roles and further stabilise pathological frameworks. At that point, success is no longer merely surrogate.
It becomes a matter of taste.
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