🚀 go-pugleaf

If the MAGICIAN'S HAT philosophy were to be given a more serious name,
the suitable one is MAGICAL INSTRUMENTALISM. Officially logic is a
crucial tool for instrumentalists but, somewhat paradoxically, they
place no emphasis on validity, that is, on the truth-preserving
procedure constituting any single link of the deductive chain. It
seems inherent in the subconsciousness of philosophers of science
that, since many of the arguments are invalid, no verification inside
the deductive chain should be undertaken: only the final predictions
of the theory deserve attention.

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Lakatos' PROTECTIVE BELT philosophy is a special case of the
MAGICIAN'S HAT philosophy:

The MAGICIAN'S HAT philosophy: Science is taken to constitute the
interior of a magician's hat where you put ties which are then turned
to rabbits. The magician is free to secretly rearrange the interior of
the hat so that always rabbits and never wolves jump out of it. The
public declares itself ready to boycott the seances if wolves and not
rabbits jump out of the hat but in fact loves the magician so much
(there are hymns "Divine Magician" and "Yes we all believe in the hat,
hat, hat") that seances would take place even if Tyrannosaurus rex
jumped out of the hat.

Other contributions to the MAGICIAN'S HAT philosophy:

Karl Popper: "On the other hand, I also realized that we must not
exclude immunizations, not even all which introduce ad hoc auxiliary
hypothesis....All this shows not only that some degree of dogmatism is
fruitful, even in science, but also that logically speaking
falsifiability or testability cannot be regarded as a very sharp
criterion."

Thomas Kuhn: "Something even more fundamental than standards and
values is, however, also at stake. I have so far argued only that
paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense
in which they are constitutive of nature as well."

Paul Feyerabend: "Today science prevails not because of its
comparative merits but because the show has been rigged in its
favour."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com