Epistemology

As a kid in Colombia I had a free subscription to La Pura Verdad — the Spanish edition of The Plain Truth, founded in 1934 by Herbert W. Armstrong and mailed out of Ambassador College in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. It was, unmistakably, evangelical literature: prophecy, end-times reasoning, a specific reading of scripture aimed at conversion. I was never a Christian. Nothing about the magazine’s theology took. And yet I kept reading it, issue after issue, because some of the articles were very good — well-researched, well-written, curious about the world in a way that had nothing to do with doctrine. …

Luca Pacioli did not invent double-entry bookkeeping — Venetian merchants had been using it for at least a century before his 1494 treatise wrote the method down — but he did name the discipline’s real trick. Every transaction gets entered twice, once as a debit and once as a credit, and if the two columns ever fail to match, an error exists somewhere in the world the ledger describes. The genius of the system is not that it records money. It is that it manufactures a built-in alarm for reality not matching the record. Historians of science have mostly ignored this as a source of method, filing it under commerce rather than epistemology. But run the same trick on nature instead of a merchant’s warehouse, and a surprising amount of the history of discovery turns out to be exactly this: someone auditing a ledger, finding it would not close, and naming whatever was missing so it would. …

The duck test is one of the cleanest heuristics in the epistemological toolkit: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, treat it as a duck. It works because surface signs are usually entangled with underlying causes. Ducks walk the way they do because of their anatomy; they quack because of the shape of their bill. The surface and the substance are not independent. When you correctly read the surface, you have usually correctly identified the substance underneath. …