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← The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science

The New Inquisition Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science Chapter 2. Skepticism and Blind Faith

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1986 Review Date: 2022-8-25 Status:📚

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  • Highlight(pink) - Page 47 · Location 884 In the beginning of Chapter One I asked you to play the Aristotelian Logic game and classify some propositions as “true” or “false.” The first of these propositions was “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.” Within the Aristotelian game, with only two choices, it is probable that most of us would classify this proposition as “true.” Since the invention of the thermometer, most people have found this statement true. That is because most people have lived at or near sea-level, historically. Those who live in the Alps, the Rocky Mountains or the Himalayas—and those scientists who have done research at such altitudes—realize that the statement needs to be modified before we can call it true. It should say “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea-level on this planet.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 48 · Location 893 Similarly, the second proposition—“pq equals qp”—is only true, or valid, within ordinary algebra. It is not true in the equally valid (self-consistent) algebra invented by William Rowan Hamilton.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 48 · Location 895 It is possible that “truth” only exists when one has already specified the context or field within which one is speaking.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 57 · Location 1073 if “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius” is only true at sea-level on this planet—and perhaps at a few similar places in space-time, but not everywhere in space-time—and if “pq equals qp” is only true (or “valid”) within one kind of algebra—Then, perhaps “truth” is only relative to a context of some sort?

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 57 · Location 1080 we might remember the opinion of Sir Karl Popper, who holds that we can never establish Absolute Truth since that would require an infinite number of tests; Popper also argues that Absolute Falsity can be established, since a statement in absolute form is falsified once a single exception to it is found.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 57 · Location 1083 If we accept this view, which seems historically plausible, then the Aristotelian true/ false game becomes relative to our knowledge at a particular time in history and should be modified at least to “Relatively True” and “Absolutely False.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 57 · Location 1086 For instance, unless we are excessively pedantic, “Ronald Reagan wrote Hamlet” should be considered Absolutely False. If we want to be excessively pedantic, we can rewrite this proposition as “Ronald Reagan wrote the version of Hamlet attributed to Shakespeare,” and then it is Absolutely False, since we know of at least one (and, in fact, many) copies of “Shakespeare’s” Hamlet that were in print before Mr. Reagan was born. (We thus avoid the “tricky” possibility that Mr. Reagan wrote his own version of Hamlet in youth and then went stark staring sane and destroyed it—as I destroyed my own poetic effusions of youth—)

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 57 · Location 1093 How about our proposition 3, “The infamous Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife”? We stipulate that “the infamous Dr. Crippen” is the Dr. Crippen that most readers are thinking of, the first man arrested by wireless telegraphy: that Dr. Crippen.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 57 · Location 1096 This proposition, like the ones about the boiling point of water and pq being equal to qp, appears at least Relatively True, to most of us. It is interesting, however, that we seem to have already passed through three kinds of Relative Truth.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 58 · Location 1099 “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius” is “true” relative to the laws of physics at sea-level on this planet. “pq equals qp” is valid (the word “truth” is seldom used in this area anymore) relative to one kind of algebra—the kind most people use in economic affairs. (It is not valid in the Hamiltonian algebra used in quantum mechanics.)

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 58 · Location 1103 “The infamous Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife” is “true” relative to the rules of evidence in our legal system. Traditionally we express this by saying Dr. Crippen was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This kind of “proof,” however, is not the experimental proof of physics nor the formal proof of mathematics; it is legal proof. At the risk of seeming even more pedantic and annoying than usual, I suggest that since scientific proof, mathematical proof and legal proof all have different rules, they refer to three kinds of “truth” or three kinds of demonstration.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 58 · Location 1107 “The infamous Dr. Crippen was convicted of poisoning his wife” seems to be a fourth kind of statement, namely a historical “truth,” and is (or seems to all but the nth-plateau skeptic) more certain than the “legal truth” that the blighter did poison his wife. The historical “truth” (Crippen was convicted) is based on the assumption that we possess accurate records, but the statement that Crippen was guilty is based on the additional assumption that the jury did not make a mistake in that case.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 63 · Location 1202 Consider proposition 6, “Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time.” This can hardly be considered a scientific statement, since there is no such instrument as a pulchritometer which can give us a measurement in milivenuses comparing Ms. Monroe with, say, Jane Russell or Diana Dors. Nor is it a mathematical statement, obviously. It isn’t a legal verdict, since no jury ruled on the case.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 63 · Location 1206 I suggest, following some ideas in semantics and modern logic, that “Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time” should be considered a self-referential statement. That is, it refers to the nervous system of the speaker. Properly, it should be phrased as “Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me.” Stated thusly, it is “true” (unless we want to be so tricky as to assume the speaker is deliberately deceiving us).

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 63 · Location 1210 Such self-referential “truths” are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are “false,” but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical “truths.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 63 · Location 1214 It seems that a potent source of error, and of potential dogmatism, enters our “thinking” when our language is not pedantic enough. “Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time” seems to be a statement about some “objective reality” and can easily lead to arguments with Sophia Loren fans; but “Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me” declares itself as a self-referential proposition and does not so readily get confused with “objective” statements.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 63 · Location 1219 Similarly, proposition 13, “Beethoven is a better composer than Mozart” might most profitably be considered a self-referential statement, which should be reformulated more correctly as “Beethoven seems a better composer than Mozart to me.” Of course, music criticism—and art criticism in general—would be less lively and bitchy if this semantic reform were accepted; but it might make more sense.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 64 · Location 1222 According to the Logical Positivists, statements about the comparative beauty of Monroe and Loren, or Beethoven and Mozart, or Van Gogh and Picasso, etc. should all be considered “meaningless.” We are not so stringent here. We grant that such statements are meaningful—to the people who make them. We are merely suggesting that, by calling them self-referential, we can avoid the errors and emotional tantrums that inevitably creep into conversation when it is tacitly assumed that they are statements of the same order as those about the boiling point of water or about pq and qp or even about whether Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 64 · Location 1227 How about proposition 10, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a pornographic novel”? It might be said that this was a legally true statement until the courts changed their minds about that, I suppose. It might also be said that this kind of statement is as self-referential as the ones about comparative beauty, and the courts in considering the matter at all were confusing the self-referential class with other, more objective classes.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 64 · Location 1234 Until pulchritometers and smutometers come on the market, it might be wise to regard statements about beauty and pornography as at least self-referential, even if we do not join the Logical Positivists in calling them totally meaningless.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 64 · Location 1236 But, then, how about proposition 11, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a sexist novel”? If we call that a self-referential statement, too, we will make ourselves even more unpopular. As in the case of a new nuclear plant mentioned earlier, we seem to be entering here a borderline area where the “scientific,” the “esthetic” and the “moral” cannot be disentangled to the satisfaction of any two commentators: where “objective” and “subjective” indeed overlap alarmingly. Perhaps recognizing that problem, rather than claiming to solve it, is itself a step toward clarity?

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 74 · Location 1463 Most modern logicians would classify 15, “God has spoken to me” as equally meaningless in the above sense. Partially, I agree. Partially, I think it more accurate, and compassionate, to regard this as a badly-formulated self-referential statement. That is, just as “Beethoven is better than Mozart” is a bad formulation of the self-referential proposition ‘Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me,” it may be most helpful to consider “God has spoken to me” as a bad formulation of the correct proposition, “I have had such an awe-inspiring experience that the best model I know to describe it is to say that God spoke to me.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 74 · Location 1468 I think this is helpful because the proposition is only false if the person is deliberately lying, and because it reminds us that similar experiences are often stated within other paradigms, such as “I became one with the Buddha-mind” or “I became one with the Universe.” These have different philosophical meanings than “God has spoken to me,” but probably refer to the same kind of etic (non-verbal) experiences.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 73 · Location 1442 “There is a tenth planet in our solar system, beyond Pluto,” can neither be verified nor refuted at the date I am typing this. (It is a measure of scientific acceleration in our time that it might be verified or refuted by the time this reaches the bookstores, incidentally.)

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 73 · Location 1443 Logical Positivists once wanted to call propositions of this sort “meaningless,” but that position has crumbled, and most modern logicians would probably agree with the terminology of Dr. Anatole Rapoport who calles such statements indeterminate.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 73 · Location 1446 An indeterminate proposition cannot be verified or refuted at the date when we confront it, but there are clear scientific processes by which it can be verified or refuted at some future date.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 73 · Location 1449 The tenth planet beyond Pluto, in this instance, will be discovered, or won’t be discovered, when the space telescope goes into orbit in the near future. The existence of advanced life-forms beyond Earth may not be verified or refuted for a thousand years or longer—or it may be verified tomorrow, if the “Space Brothers” beloved in UFO lore suddenly land en masse—but at present it remains similarly indeterminate.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 74 · Location 1456 Of course, 8, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” fits the classic Logical Positivist (and Linguistic Analyst) category of truly “meaningless” statements. That is because nobody can imagine a way of observing a colorless green idea, even in the far future, or of learning its sleeping habits.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 74 · Location 1459 However, even here, a little pedantry is at least as amusing as it is annoying. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is meaningless as a philosophical or scientific proposition, but I did not pick it at random. It is quite meaningful in another sense. Prof. Noam Chomsky uses it to illustrate a technical point in linguistics, namely that we can recognize a correct grammatical structure even when we can’t recognize any sensible message in the grammar.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 75 · Location 1472 What, then, do we make of 12, “The Pope is infallible in matters of faith and morals”? Some would call this meaningless, since it can neither be verified nor refuted, and some would see it as a badly-formulated self-referential proposition (” I accept the Pope as infallible in matters of faith and morals.“) I would suggest that it might be better to consider this a Game Rule. That is, it is a Rule which one must accept if one wishes to play the Roman Catholic game; if one rejects it, one is automatically excluded from the Roman Catholic game.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 75 · Location 1476 Similarly, “The umpire’s decision is binding” is a Rule of the Game of Baseball and “You may not eat pork” is a Rule of the Game of Orthodox Judaism.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 75 · Location 1477 Therefore, I think it makes sense to regard proposition 18, “All human beings are created equal” as a Game Rule of liberal democracy. Certainly, this is not a scientific statement, since some humans are measurably taller, or measurably have higher IQs, or write better poetry, etc. And to describe “All human beings are created equal” as self-referential misses its point, since it is not merely a paraphrase of “I wish to treat all human beings as equal.” It is a proposal for what type of society we (or some of us) wish to have. Therefore, it should be considered a Game Rule for that type of society, precisely as the Pope’s “infallibility” is a Game Rule of Roman Catholicism.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 75 · Location 1483 Proposition 16, “The following sentence is false” presents a new kind of problem. Once again, the proposition can hardly be classed as true or false in itself, and we have to judge its truth or falsity in a context. Fortunately, the context is specified, and is Proposition 17, “The previous sentence was true.” In this case, the context seems to confuse us instead of enlightening us. The first sentence is true if false, and false if true. Such systems are traditionally called paradoxes; I prefer to borrow a term from Mr. Hofstadter and call them Strange Loops.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 75 · Location 1489 The classic Strange Loop, of course, is the notorious Cretan who informs us that Cretans always lie. A more modern instance is the barber who shaves every man in town who does not shave himself.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 75 · Location 1491 If Proposition 16 is true, it is false. If the egregious Cretan is telling the truth, he is lying. If the barber shaves himself, he does not shave himself.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 76 · Location 1494 Such Strange Loops are not merely philosophical comedy or games by which logicians annoy one another. As I have argued in Prometheus Rising, and as has been argued by Bateson and Ruesch (Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry) and Watslavick (How Real is Real?) and many others, a great deal of personal and social irrationality seems to result from people accepting Strange Loops into their thinking. I personally suspect that much of what I call the New Inquisition results from the Strange Loop

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 76 · Location 1500 A. All ideas deserve equal protection under the law. B. Some ideas do not deserve equal protection under law. The New Fundamentalists have some dim respect for Rule A, which is deeply embedded in modern Western culture, even while their Faith drives them to act on Rule B. This leads them to remarkable flights of Irrational Rationalism.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 76 · Location 1504 A great number of “mental illnesses” seem to result from the Strange Loop A. I must obey my parents’ Game Rules. B. I must obey my society’s Game Rules. When the parental and social Game Rules differ very greatly, some degree of “mental illness” is almost inevitable.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 76 · Location 1508 In logic, there is no escape from a Strange Loop. In pragmatic life, there is an easy escape—reject one part of the system. Sombunall can be very helpful there. A disturbed patient is beginning to recover, for instance, when the last Strange Loop is modified to: A. I must obey sombunall of my parents’ Game Rules. B. I must obey sombunall of society’s Game Rules.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 76 · Location 1512 Proposition 5, “The Nazis killed 6,000,000 Jews” presents us with even more disturbing problems, because it is believed by almost everybody and rejected by a vehement minority called Holocaust Revisionists. The case for Holocaust Revisionism is that there is a Vast Worldwide Conspiracy that has faked all the evidence which the rest of us naively accept.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 77 · Location 1515 Holocaust Revisionism or HR can hardly be called “false” in a historical sense because it is not part of the History Game; it rejects the rules of evidence that historians play by. This can be seen by comparing it with the thesis that President Richard Nixon never existed and all evidence of such a man was faked by another Vast Worldwide Conspiracy. One cannot disprove either HR or NR (Nixon Revisionism) since all historical evidence relevant to the dispute is defined as tainted.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 77 · Location 1520 I think it is safest to regard HR as another Strange Loop. By assuming all inconvenient evidence is faked, one opens an infinite regress, and one can logically ask next if the evidence that Holocaust Revisionists exist might have been faked (i.e. did the ethnomethodologists or other sociologists interested in “breaching experiments” on reality-tunnels manufacture the books and pamphlets of HR as an experiment, to see if we would believe people would write such documents seriously?).

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 77 · Location 1526 I think a Strange Loop only appears when the charge of fake involves a conspiracy of such size that all evidence becomes suspect since a conspiracy of that magnitude can in principle deceive us about anything.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 71 · Location 1405 ❗️ As a philosopher, or a public nuisance—the two terms have been interchangeable since the time of Socrates—I think our judgment about this yarn especially, and about the others in general, really rests on the degree to which Platonism still dominates Western thought unconsciously. I think what we are asking ourselves in each case is whether Absolute Laws are being violated or not; if a story doesn’t directly contradict such Absolute Laws, then we tend to think, however bizarre or unusual it may be, it might be possible, but if it does contradict Absolute Laws, then we “know” (or think we “know”) that it is impossible.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 72 · Location 1411 The New Fundamentalism usually calls itself Science when it wishes to impress and put on some swank; it more bluntly calls itself Materialism when it is pugnaciously seeking quarrels with mystics or poets or such oddballs; but I think it can accurately be called the latest variety of neo-Platonism.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 72 · Location 1413 What are Absolute Laws supposed to be? They are supposed to be spaceless, timeless, eternal and unchanging—just like Plato’s Ideas or forms. How can we know these ectoplasmic entities? Not by science in the grubby, nitty-gritty sense in which I, or the woman in the street, or modern physicists, know science; for that kind of science—the kind we see in the real world—only produces models which are good for a time and place, and it discards these models as soon as better models are created.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 72 · Location 1417 Absolute Laws in the Platonic sense cannot be known scientifically—as Plato himself realized. They can only be “known” (or imagined) by intuition or by some Act of Faith.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 72 · Location 1418 Empirically and existentially, nobody knows today, right now, if we have any Absolute Laws in our intellectual common market. All that we know is that we have some models that work a lot better, practically, than some of the older models we have discarded.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 72 · Location 1421 If the so-called “laws” contained in our models are only generalizations based on our experience until this date—if they are not spaceless, timeless, eternal and given by some divinity or other—then things that do not fit our current models should not be rejected a priori. They should be studied carefully, as clues that might lead us to better models tomorrow.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 73 · Location 1428 Our understanding of “matter” changes continually, particularly in this century; and the majority of physicists seem to think “matter” itself belongs in the dubious quotes with which I decorate it habitually, since “matter” currently appears as a kind of temporary knottiness in energy. We do not know “all” about “matter,” and we know that we do not. A philosophy of materialism per se need not dogmatically reject any data a priori, since any data might, if verified, teach us more about “matter.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 73 · Location 1434 The only philosophy that can dogmatically reject a priori any data is the Platonic philosophy of spaceless, timeless, eternal Ideas, or Absolute Laws.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 73 · Location 1436 The New Fundamentalists are not as far separated from the Old Fundamentalists as they like to think they are.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 48 · Location 899 Perhaps what I am doing in this damned crazy book is demonstrating a new quasi-Newtonian law in psychology—a law whereby every mental action produces an equal and opposite mental reaction, so that every Idol, or obsession, if worshipped devoutly enough (and humorlessly enough) gradually turns into its own opposite. In particular, we will see evidence that skepticism and blind faith often turn into each other if somebody is logical enough, or mad enough, to pursue them to that point of pure abstract consistency where ordinary common sense is left behind in the rush for certitude.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 48 It is obvious that every dogmatic faith produces around itself a secondary layer of doubt, denial and outright skepticism—about rival faiths.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 49 · Location 911 Less obviously, the humorless or obsessive or crusading skeptic has his or her own blind faith, a psychological scotoma that is unconscious and therefore unacknowledged. To deny dogmatically is to say that something is impossible. But to assert this is to claim, tacitly, that you already know the full spectrum of the possible.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 49 · Location 914 In a century in which every decade has brought new and astonishing scientific shocks, that is a huge, brave and audacious faith indeed. It requires an almost heroic self-confidence and an equally gigantic ignorance of recent intellectual history.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 49 · Location 917 The only escape from this trap, as far as I can see, is to be skeptical about one’s own skepticism: which is what I mean by “the New Agnosticism.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 50 · Location 933 Because I have a vulgar taste for a little baroque rhetoric now and then, I shall continue to call these high priests of the modern Idol, the New Inquisition, and refer to their dogmatic reality-tunnel as the New Fundamentalism.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 50 · Location 936 These are not intended solely as terms of abuse such as all polemicists try to hang around the necks of their opponents. I wish to distinguish between liberals and fundamentalists, in science as well as in religion, and even in general philosophy.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 50 · Location 938 For instance, one who has had his mind enlarged or ruined by a good course in epistemology might come out a fundamentalist, or absolutist, Humean—convinced that all proof is impossible and no idea is any more valid than another. But a wiser and less logical student might become merely a liberal Humean—one who holds that no proof is absolute but some ideas are more plausible than others, e.g. “If it rains, the streets will get wet.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 50 · Location 941 Similarly, there are liberal Theists everywhere these days, who will cheerfully admit there is no undeniable argument for God’s existence, but still think the case for God a little better than the case against God.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 50 · Location 942 And, of course, there are fundamentalist Theists, survivors of the Old Inquisition, who would happily burn at the stake anybody who has any doubts on the matter at all.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 50 · Location 944 The liberal materialist, then, I define as one who holds that materialism is a “relative best bet” among competing philosophies, or the most plausible model around, whereas the fundamentalist materialist—either out of ignorance of philosophy or out of sheer bravado or out of blind faith—proclaims that materialism is the One True Philosophy and that anyone with doubts or hesitations about it is insane, perverse or a deliberate fraud.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 50 · Location 948 This One True Philosophy is the modern form of the One True Church of the dark ages. The fundamentalist materialist is the modern Idolator; he has made an image of the world, and now he kneels and worships it.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 51 · Location 950 Fundamentalist science is similar to other fundamentalisms. Lacking humor, charity and some measure of self-doubt, it behaves intolerantly, fanatically and savagely to all “heretics.” Eventually, like all closed ideological systems, it becomes comical and overtly ridiculous

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 79 · Location 1568 Spokesmen for the New Fundamentalism, who have their own favorite neologisms, often speak of “the New Irrationalism.” By this term they designate an attitude of mind which suspects the scientific community as a whole of engaging in the kind of deceptions which the New Fundamentalists attribute only to parapsychologists and other heretics.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 80 · Location 1570 I agree that many of the claims of the New Irrationalism are as absurd as my little flight of fantasy about quasars and black holes, but I think the Citadel has created this Strange Loop for itself.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 80 · Location 1572 If Prof. X is paid by the government to invent weapons to kill people, some will inevitably wonder about the moral character of Prof. X.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 80 · Location 1574 If Prof. Y claims that Prof. Z the parapsychologist is untrustworthy, some will wonder if Prof. Y himself can be trusted fully, and if science is truly “impartial.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 80 · Location 1575 In a world of TOP SECRET stamps and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, some will inevitably wonder how much is being hidden from them by the Citadel, as the Manhattan Project was hidden in the 1940s and C.I.A. drug research was hidden in the 1960s and 1970s.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 80 · Location 1578 As long as the Cold War exists, the New Irrationality will have its own kind of rationality, just as Establishment-salaried Rationality has its own irrationalism.

  • Highlight(pink) - Page 80 · Location 1580 Against the paranoia that easily infests either Establishment dogma and anti-Establishment dogma, the only defense I see is agnosticism, well-flavored with a sense of humor, and an awareness of one’s own fallibility.

Notes

Amount: 9

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