Personal website – any views expressed herein are my own unless otherwise obvious
Adam: Tell me, how did you get involved in this sort of thing?
Basil: Oh. Right. University.
Adam: Yeah?
Basil: Recruited by a handsome tutor. Oh, God.
Adam: Did you not think twice, no?
Basil: Not for a second. My therapist would say – if I hadn’t told her I was a dentist – that I am the product of an immigrant family, cursed with a compulsion to impress the natives.
Adam: [laughs] Cheers to that.
(The Night Manager, Series 2, Episode 4, 18:12.)
If you have read about critical theory and the Frankfurt School, you probably think of names like Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, and Fromm. You might also be interested in Hilda Weiss (1900-1981), a forgotten and important member of the School.
Weiss directed a novel mixed methods survey of workers’ conditions in Germany around 1930, which had 3,300 participants. The questions were probably influenced by a questionnaire developed by Karl Marx in 1880 (bet you didn’t know he ran a survey!), which she uncovered while working in an archive.
I kept seeing her name mentioned in footnotes, including one asking readers if they knew her whereabouts – rather unusual in academic papers. I wrote her Wikipedia page.
David Smith (2020, p. 138) summarises her contribution:
Hilde Weiss is one of the truly neglected figures in the history of the Frankfurt School. But that neglect is inversely proportional to her importance. Weiss was in many ways the principal architect of the workers’ survey, which built on work she had already completed in industrial sociology and laid the foundation for research she would later conduct on Marx and the history of working-class surveys and families. Politically, Weiss was among the most active and astute members of the Institute, and she was better educated in Marxian theory, sociology, and labor studies than Fromm, Horkheimer, or Adorno. She was intimately familiar with trade unions and she had direct, disillusioning experiences of both left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism.
See also Nancy Fraser’s definition of critical theory and other posts on Hilda Weiss.
Smith, D. (2020). Anti-authoritarian Marxism: Erich Fromm, Hilde Weiss, and the Politics of Radical Humanism. In K. Durkin & J. Braune (Eds), Erich Fromm’s critical theory: Hope, humanism, and the future (pp. 131–165). Bloomsbury Academic.
“Let me tell you something. May I? It is very dangerous to play with reality. Will you remember that?”
– Stefanie, in The Secret Pilgrim, by John le Carré
An interesting paper on theory-ladenness in research on black holes (Doboszewski & Elder, 2025). Relevant to debates in policy evaluation on theory-based evaluation too and the pervasive role of theory whether or not you name the TBE brand.
‘Philosophers have raised a range of worries about the ways in which observations are theory-laden. In this article, we are focusing on the theory-ladenness of measurement outcomes—the ways in which the “observations” derived from an experiment or measurement are affected by theoretical assumptions that are made in the course of the experiment. The greatest concern is that theory-ladenness may lead to a vicious circularity where the theoretical assumptions made by the experimenters—either in the physical design of the experiment or in subsequent inferences from the empirical data—make it more likely or even guarantee that the observation will confirm the theory being tested. This might occur if the hypothesis being tested is presupposed by the experimental methods being used. Franklin (2015, 156) provides the following toy example of this: if we use a mercury thermometer to test a hypothesis that substances expand as their temperature increases, this is theory-laden in a way that risks vicious circularity because the proper functioning of a mercury thermometer relies on the very hypothesis being tested.’ (pp. 829-830)
‘… the impossibility of controlled experiments on astrophysical targets (stars, galaxies, etc.) places constraints on how astronomers can investigate these systems. Simulations can help make up for the lack of controlled interventions by providing a proxy system into which one can intervene.’ (p. 830)
Doboszewski, J., & Elder, J. (2025). How Theory-Laden Are Observations of Black Holes? Philosophy of Science, 92(4), 827–849.
Preprint here.
“Change doesn’t happen in straight lines and is propagated (or not) by human actors with their own preferences and motivations. Delivery is disaggregated between departments, tiers of government, sectors, agencies, regulators and professions. The economy is not a thing but an aggregation of billions of decisions, each made on the basis of incentives, opportunities and desires. Citizens’ choices and relationships control far more of what happens in our country than any Prime Minister could ever dream. Culture eats levers for breakfast.”
– Polly Mackenzie (2025, 19 Dec). There aren’t any levers.
Joas and Knöbl (2009, p. 6) on how Popper demolished positivism in 1934:
As Popper lays out in his now very famous book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which first appeared in 1934, in the case of most scientific problems we cannot be certain whether a generalization, that is, a theory or hypothesis, truly applies in all cases. In all probability, we will never be able to verify once and for all the astrophysical statement that ‘All planets move around their suns along an elliptical trajectory’, because we are unlikely ever to get to know all the solar systems in the universe and therefore we will presumably never be able to confirm with absolute certainty that every single planet does in fact follow an elliptical trajectory around its sun, as opposed to some other route. Much the same applies to the statement ‘All swans are white’. Even if you have seen thousands of swans and all of them were in fact white, you can ultimately never be certain that a black, green, blue, etc. swan will not show up at some point. As a rule, universal statements cannot therefore be confirmed or verified. To put it another way: inductive arguments (that is, inference from individual instances to a totality) are neither logically valid nor truly compelling arguments; induction cannot be justified purely in terms of logic, because we are unable to rule out the possibility that one observation may eventually be made that refutes the general statement thought to be corroborated. Positivists’ attempts to trace laws back to elementary observations or to derive them from elementary observations and verify them are thus doomed to failure. This was precisely Popper’s criticism.
Joas, H., & Knöbl, W. (2009). What is theory? In Social theory: Twenty introductory lectures (pp. 1–19). Cambridge University Press.
“[…] if I wish to be understood by others, and if I wish to enlist others for my purposes, then I must present myself in a way that conforms to folk-psychological platitudes, or laws. To explain my actions – even my most outrageous ones – to others is to find an appropriate set of folk-psychological platitudes in the light of which I am understandable and predictable. […] Given the fundamental role of folk psychology, it should not come as a surprise that it is also the intuition most strongly protected by sanctions. Inability to come up with acceptable folk-psychological accounts of ourselves and others is sanctioned by disapproval, lack of acceptance, or even referral to psychiatric services. No wonder, therefore, that social psychologists find their subjects ‘telling more than they know’: rather than admit that they have no introspective access to many of their higher cognitive processes, subjects will tell folk-psychological stories of how their mind allegedly works.”
– Martin Kusch (1999, p. 239), Psychological knowledge: A social history and philosophy. Routledge.
“[…] the most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves, who keeps in the background the part he has played, perhaps unconsciously, in selecting and grouping them […]”
– Alfred Marshall (1885, February 24). The present position of economics. Inaugural lecture, University of Cambridge. Reprinted in Hodgson, G. M. (2005). Journal of Institutional Economics, 1(1), 121–137.
‘… there are more red flags here than in a People’s Liberation Army parade. To critique this paper is not quite “shooting fish in a barrel,” because the fish are already dead before we’ve reached the end of the abstract.’
– Scott Aaronson, commenting on a paper on a paper from HSBC and IBM claiming to use a quantum computer to get a 34% advantage in predictions of financial trading data
“One day I asked a passionate and healthy young woman: ‘How can one find out if one is in love? It is also possible to want to take your mother in your arms and kiss her, isn’t it?’ She explained: ‘When you kiss your lover, you want him to die of your kisses and you want to disappear into him (she used another very characteristic word) etc.,’ – there is an infinity of expressions. The most elevated instincts always present themselves as murderous instincts. To begin with there is the little brother who calls the kitten: ‘Puss! Puss! My little darling! I love you! I am going to torture you and make you die!’; besides there is the well-known fact that lovers love to tease and torment each other, and moreover there is martyrdom and crimes of passion. Everywhere you see the pleasure involved in destroying and dying.” (Sabina Spielrein, 2001, p. 160)
Spielrein, S. (2001). Unedited extracts from a diary (1906/1907?). Journal of Analytical Psychology, 46, 155–171.