I think you might be overestimating the role emotions and identity play in maintaining the integrity of a system of epistemic statements. There are structural reasons beyond simply how much I like my ideas or other incentives to keep my ideas that make scientific reasoning hard. Devoid of emotion and human nature concerns, we still end up with optimization problems which feel fuzzy because they're fuzzy, not because there's anything clouding our vision.
The epicycle models that dominated cosmology's explanations of orbits comes to mind, if only because it's a good example that is obvious enough in hindsight as to be uncontroversial. Epicycles carry such strong descriptive power that it does make sense to add more epicycles if you're merely trying to explain your data. But because epicycles don't require information from gravitation, it feels like crackpottery to introduce such information even if it results in a simple model.
Another example that's more obviously structural is building set theory without any notion of self-reflective statements. Russell's paradox undid the first iteration of set theory despite that system being quite descriptive.
If you built a whole system of thought on a powerful, incorrect statement, you're fooling yourself but it's understandable.
I can't evaluate it well enough to say if it's true, but some crackpots are coming up with models of black whole phenomena without event horizons, based on a similar problem as epicycles might of had. That's all I'll say because I think I've exhausted the controversy I can put into one post. :)
The epicycle models that dominated cosmology's explanations of orbits comes to mind, if only because it's a good example that is obvious enough in hindsight as to be uncontroversial. Epicycles carry such strong descriptive power that it does make sense to add more epicycles if you're merely trying to explain your data. But because epicycles don't require information from gravitation, it feels like crackpottery to introduce such information even if it results in a simple model.
Another example that's more obviously structural is building set theory without any notion of self-reflective statements. Russell's paradox undid the first iteration of set theory despite that system being quite descriptive.
If you built a whole system of thought on a powerful, incorrect statement, you're fooling yourself but it's understandable.
I can't evaluate it well enough to say if it's true, but some crackpots are coming up with models of black whole phenomena without event horizons, based on a similar problem as epicycles might of had. That's all I'll say because I think I've exhausted the controversy I can put into one post. :)