Dear editors: This site does have integrity after all. I don’t care what political angle someone is coming from, after all free speech is what makes this country so special! But the fact that you allow me to dispel the inaccurate accusations of “Cicero”, i.e. “schoolboy”, “goose-stepper behind the German Emperor” or the idée fixe that I am steeped in historical orthodoxy, which is totally taken out of the blue air, is greatly appreciated.
As a matter of fact, I belong to the German revisionist of psychoanalytical theories of Hitler’s assumed “psychosis”. This is something that was widely published in Germany and brought me the wrath of the “historical orthodoxy” in the 1990s in this country. How ironic that I would now be accused by an ignoramus of the same crime . But the world looks still different depending on which site of the pond the frog sits.
This does not mean however, that I agree with Buchanan’s thesis, which is clearly falsified by historical facts. As a matter of fact, it is one of the few instances in the history of science where a hypotheses has been truly falsified because it is not phrased as a probabilistic, but as a deterministic statement. As a result, one instance of references that falsifies the statement leads to the total collapse of the argument from the point of view of philosophy of science. In Buchanan’s case neither Imre Lakatos’ research program, nor Kuhn’s version of the history of philosophy or even Feyerabend’s methodological anarchism can be brought into play to find a way out of the intellectual morass that Buchanan put himself into by stating his thesis as a deterministic one rather than an inductive one. Apodictive statements always incite Tisiphone, Megaera and Alecto to let loose the furies on the perpetrators of intellectual “crimes”. The infamous 5% rule introduced by R.A. Fisher in 1925 does not apply to Buchanan’s non-probabilistic thesis (be it in the form of the frequency of probability, Bayes’ subjective probability, Keyne’s propensity theory of probability or Fisher’s maximum likelihood version of probability. His thesis is refuted by the facts that lay buried in a simple book in the Congress of library. How sad that a “historian” has such little grasp of the impact history can have on his beloved work. As Weber said, be aware of the unintended consequences of your actions.