DO WE HAVE AN ATTACK ON FANATICISM?
The argument in a nutshell: (1) fanaticism feeds on “justificationism”, that is the assumption that everything depends on “justified true beliefs” that are revealed or supported by the correct authority; (2) The CR critique of justificationism provides what Richard Hamming called an “attack” on the theories, traditions and practices that feed fanaticism.
Elsewhere I have talked about this in the language of “draining the swamp of unreason”. This article shows how the little-known work of William W. Bartley has the potential to vastly increase the effectiveness of skeptical resistance to superstition and prejudice in their many forms and varieties. Creative problem solving and imaginative criticism is straitjacketed by the dogmatic 'true belief' framework of Western thought. This framework generates on the one hand true believers who insist that they have the truth in their grasp, on the other hand relativists and nihilists who think that truth and falsehood are indistinguishable. The framework can be cracked with the aid of ideas from Karl Popper and William W. Bartley to create an intellectual environment where imaginative criticism and the pursuit of knowledge will flourish. In this environment the swamp of unreason and prejudice may be drained, instead of merely being held back in one place while it spreads elsewhere.
The idea of an "attack"
Richard Hamming wrote that serious scientists should have a list of problems that they would like to work on, but they can't work on all of them at the same time, and some are off the active list because there is no attack available. An attack is "a good starting place, some reasonable idea of how to begin."
"I begin with the choice of problem. Most scientists spend almost all of their time working on problems that even they admit are neither great or are likely to lead to great work; hence, almost surely, they will not do important work. Note that importance of the results of a solution does not make the problem important. In all the 30 years I spent at Bell Telephone Laboratories (before it was broken up) no one to my knowledge worked on time travel, teleportation, or anti-gravity. Why? Because they had no attack on the problem. Thus an important aspect of any problem is that you have a good attack, a good starting place, some reasonable idea of how to begin."
Surprisingly he did not give examples of the some problems that were addressed successfully when an attack became available. Off the top of my head I can suggest: the deveLopment of the calculus that helped Newton with his calculations, especially where acceleration was involved (the rate of change of some other "rate of change"); the use of models by Watson and Crick; the invention of the electron microscope; the import of theories and experimental methods from engineering and soil mechanics to look at the mechanical properties of plants (a field pioneered in a very basic way by Darwin).
So the attack can be a conceptual development in some unrelated field of pure theory, "simple" application of cardboard and string representations of atomic structures, the ability to look at the fine structure of things, and the transfer of theories and methods over the road from one laboratory to another.
The problem here is fanaticism and the attack is the idea of non-justificationism advanced by Popper and developed by Bartley and Miller and others (please remind me about the others!).
Popper’s 1960 paper “On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance” identified the authoritarian structure of western thought and prompted Bartley to embark on a program to explore the logical limits of rationality and the problem of bringing criticism to bear upon fundamental beliefs. He confronted the perennial problem of validation and the dilemma of the infinite regress versus dogmatism. This dilemma arises as follows: If a belief claims validation by a supporting argument, what justifies the support? Where and how does the chain of justification stop? If one attempts to provide reasons for the supporting argument then an infinite regress can be forced by anyone who presses for more supporting statements which in turn demand justification. It appears that this can only be avoided by a dogmatic or arbitrary decision to stop the regress at some stage and settle on a belief at that point.
This dilemma creates conscientious objections to open-mindedness because a logical chain of argument apparently justifies dogmatism and resistance to counter arguments. To the despair of people who want to make full use of evidence and arguments to pursue both scientific truth and more effective actions, their opponents can defeat the principle of rationality on impeccably logical grounds. Bartley followed up an insight from Karl Popper who located a barely recognised and previously uncriticised assumption regarding justification and the justification of beliefs that permeates Western thought; this can be summed up in the formula.
"Beliefs must be justified by an appeal to an authority of some kind, generally the source of the belief in question, and this justification makes the belief either rational, or if not rational at least valid for the person who holds it."
Bartley labeled this theory “justificationism” and he showed how it created a demand for positive justification which can never be met for the reasons outlined above. The solution is to abandon the quest for positive justification and instead to settle for a critical preference for one option rather than others in the light of critical arguments and evidence offered to that point. A preference may (or may not) be revised in the light of new evidence and arguments. This appears to be a simple, commonsense position but it defies the dominant traditions of Western thought which have almost all taught that some authority provides (or ought to provide) grounds for positively justified beliefs. An important contribution to the literature on this topic is Notturno’s explanation of the way traditional foundationalism morphed into what he called “floating foundationalism” in an attempt to take on board the idea that our knowledge is fallible while maintaining the framework of “justified true belief” (Notturno, 2003).
What are the roots of justificationism? Perhaps there is some biological basis, no doubt there are psychological factors involved and also social factors. In addition to all these factors there is the tradition of justificationism itself, which states that we should strive to obtain justified beliefs, a theory endorsed by almost all Western philosophers from Plato to the present day. In the words of Ayer.
“For what would be the point of our testing our hypotheses at all if they earned no greater credibility by passing the tests? We seek justification for our beliefs, and the whole process of testing would be futile if it were not thought capable of providing it” (Ayer, 1982, 134).
So justificationism persists as a subjective attitude or disposition, supported by a pervasive and powerful intellectual tradition. In addition to the influence of academic philosophers in perpetuating this tradition (by example and practice, if not by overt articulation) it is likely that all the “true belief” religions propagate the same mindset by appealing to the appropriate authority to support the doctrines of the faith.
Lenin’s question. What is to be done?
What is required to address the situation where academic philosophers and the true belief religions are propagating justificationism?
Clearly all serious courses in philosophy should introduce the students to the ideas of Popper and Bartley on this topic (and others).
But what about the churches and the religions?
