This is a history of rational methods of dealing with uncertainty. It treats, therefore, methods devised in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic to get at the truth in all cases in which certainty is not attainable.
Chinese law thereafter [Confucious] changed little until the impact of Western forms of thought in the nineteenth century. Confession was regarded as almost always necessary, and torture was ordered when guilt was already certain and clear but the accused refused to confess. Early Portuguese visitors to China found torture routinely used on suspects against whom there was the least evidence and on witnesses who disagreed with one another. There was no space in Chinese law for a legal profession, and hence for any formal science of law, and so for a forum for discussion of legal questions like the strength of evidence.
“Even if someone should happen to be almost right, he could never be sure, for dokos is upon all things.” The Greek word dokos means “seeming” as opposed to really being: The One is; the Many merely seem to be. This doctrine is substantially the same as the Hindu doctrine of ma-ya- [maya], which similarly holds that since only the One is real, the Many must be a kind of seeming. This is the point where Xenophanes has seemed to some Western thinkers to have contradicted himself.
Just as the evidence has inexorably accumulated over the years supporting the observation that LCHF/ketogenic diets make us healthier, the evidence supporting the idea that saturated fat is deadly and that we should all eat low-fat diets has been fading, despite the best efforts of the orthodoxy to prop it up. The more research that’s been done, the less compelling it becomes. This is always a bad sign in science and a persuasive reason to believe that a theory or a belief is simply wrong. Outside mathematics, it’s impossible to prove anything definitively one way or the other. Evidence always exists to support reasonable hypotheses (and even some unreasonable ones), because studies will always be done that get the wrong answer or that are interpreted incorrectly. That’s why I suggest we follow the trends.
The Viennese-born Karl Popper rejected the legitimacy of empirical verification as the right way to establish scientific hypothesis and theory. Instead, despite the Duhem-Quine thesis and other objections, Popper insisted on the criterion of falsifiability, or the necessity for a hypothesis to withstand tests that could decisively disprove it, as a basis for theory choice. Further, Popper argued that falsifiability is the best criterion for demarcating true science from pseudoscience. [From the Forward by Mary Jo Nye.]
Arendt further distinguished totalitarianism from pragmatism. “Totalitarianism is distinguished from pragmatism in that it no longer believes that reality as such can teach anything and, consequently, has lost the earlier Marxist respect for facts. Pragmatism, even in the Leninist version, still assumes with the tradition of occidental thought that reality reveals truth to man, although it asserts that not contemplation, but action is the proper truth-revealing attitude.… Pragmatism always assumes the validity of experience and ‘acts’ accordingly; totalitarianism assumes only the validity of the law of a moving History or Nature. Whoever acts in accordance with this law no longer needs particular experiences.” [From a note by Jerome Kohn.]
For was not American politics liberal at birth and democratic soon after? As we are seeing, that is at best a half-truth. American conservatism was strong from the beginning. It was liberal in some ways, not in others. American conservatives, to schematize, were economically laissez-faire but dubious about the liberal faith in open-ended progress. They did not believe in equality, doubted people’s capacity for self-government, and opposed direct, unfiltered democracy. In religious terms, American conservatism tended to an Augustinian, not a Pelagian, view of humankind as flawed and, in this world, unredeemable.
