By the time interpretative proliferation has stabilised, theoretical pathology acquires a final layer of protection. This layer is not mathematical or conceptual, but linguistic.
Pathological theories learn to defend themselves by allowing their key terms to drift.
This drift is not accidental. It is the mechanism by which critique is absorbed without effect, and by which disagreement is rendered permanently inconclusive.
When terms lose their anchoring
In healthy theoretical practice, central terms are constrained by use. Their meanings are stabilised by what they help us do: identify phenomena, formulate explanations, test claims, and revise commitments.
Under pathological conditions, these constraints weaken. Terms remain in circulation, but their points of reference blur.
Words such as real, fundamental, prediction, explanation, emergent, and physical begin to operate across multiple registers at once. They slide between:
mathematical description,
metaphysical aspiration,
heuristic shorthand,
and rhetorical emphasis.
Because these registers are no longer distinguished, no single use can be pinned down.
Drift as defence
This semantic looseness functions as a form of rhetorical immunity.
When a critic asks whether a theory is real, the answer may invoke mathematical necessity. When they ask whether it is physical, the reply appeals to explanatory depth. When they ask what has been predicted, the response shifts to retrodiction, consistency, or principled expectation.
Each answer is locally appropriate. Taken together, they never address the same question.
The target moves mid-sentence.
Ambiguity without confusion
It is important to stress that this is not simply confusion or sloppy language. Participants often understand perfectly well what they are doing in local contexts. The problem is structural rather than individual.
Ambiguity becomes functional.
It allows a theory to present itself differently to different audiences:
realist when asserting importance,
instrumentalist when challenged empirically,
speculative when criticised philosophically,
rigorous when defending funding or prestige.
No single stance is ever abandoned. They coexist, overlapping just enough to prevent decisive critique.
Why criticism fails to land
This linguistic drift explains a familiar experience: the sense that criticism is always slightly misdirected.
One points out that a theory lacks empirical support, and is told that empirical support is not the point at this level of fundamentality. One questions its explanatory relevance, and is reminded of its predictive successes — now defined broadly enough to include internal coherence. One challenges its ontological claims, and is accused of misunderstanding the modesty of the proposal.
The critic is always answering yesterday’s meaning.
The inflation of key terms
As drift continues, certain terms inflate rather than clarify.
Fundamental comes to mean mathematically basic rather than explanatorily grounding. Prediction expands to include accommodation, postdiction, and expectation. Emergence becomes a label for any unresolved relation between levels. Reality stretches to cover anything that appears indispensably in a formalism.
These expansions are not corrected because they are useful. They allow a theory to retain rhetorical force while shedding accountability.
Connection to earlier diagnoses
This pattern should now be recognisable.
In When Physicists Talk About Reality, similar slippages were made visible without invoking any particular ontology. The focus there was on how language does work — how terms are stretched, hedged, and redeployed to sustain claims that would otherwise be untenable.
What the present series adds is a structural explanation. Linguistic drift is not an isolated habit of speech. It is the final stabilising mechanism of a theory that has already lost its cut, secured surrogate success, aestheticised its standards, and proliferated interpretations.
At this stage, pathology becomes self-sealing.
Looking ahead
With linguistic drift in place, there is no longer a clear way to say what would count as failure, correction, or even disagreement. The theory has become rhetorically immune.
In the final part of this series, I will argue that such pathologies cannot be repaired from within their own frames. I will also suggest — without offering a recipe — what would have to change for theoretical recovery to become possible.
That change does not begin with new data or better mathematics.
It begins with restoring a distinction.
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