From Olaf Olsen
Cross comes to grief over Occam’s razor: “the simplest explanations are the
best”. If I find an airmail letter in my mailbox, I do not conclude that a bird
brought it, because this simple explanation requires ad hoc assumptions
difficult to defend—especially if the letter is addressed to me.
A complex explanation, involving many factors such as clerks, aircraft, and
motor vehicles, is more satisfactory than the simple one assuming literate,
altruistic birds.
Cross also faults Marxists for their poor record in predicting “a crucial
phenomenon—political revolutions”. Marx attempted to make his socialism
“scientific” by identifying the social force—the working class—that
would bring a new society into existence, something that earlier “Utopian”
critics of capitalism had neglected to do.
And Marx did correctly predict that
worker-led social revolutions would take place. He did not provide a timetable,
any more than Darwin predicted when new species might appear. Both men
identified mechanisms for the introduction of new forms.
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Is there any theory of society that could have predicted the exact date and
location of the Russian Revolution in October 1917? Or of the organised
demonstrations in Seattle 1999?
New York
