Article 20
What’s To Be Done Now.
The Preamble to this website has shown that our political parties now need to replace belief with knowledge in all of their future policy-making; that this is achievable only by treating all socio-economic beliefs as hypotheses for evaluation of their compliance or non-compliance with the reality in which we exist and which we experience through our five senses; that this reality-evaluation of belief to positive or negative knowledge for respective acceptance or rejection, was first manifest in the direct observation of reality which created our craftsmanship in earliest times and which continues today whereby the craftsman observes his causal tool-use to have, or not to have, the desired effect on his work-piece; that this reality-evaluation of belief to knowledge became manifest in our subsequent scientific method of enquiry which reality-validates or reality-refutes all such cause/effect beliefs, while pseudoscience ignores this necessity for cause/effect experimentation; and that it is recognition of the presence/absence of reality-evaluation of cause/effect relationships by which I now definitively differentiate the dichotomies of knowledge/belief, truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong, good/bad and science/pseudoscience for the first time ever. However, at this point, I hasten to explain that none of the foregoing implies a single knowledge-only socio-economic future. All political parties would remain free to offer party-specific knowledge-only futures for selection by electorates, the benefit of this change being that definitive knowledge always works in reality, while past and current belief-only policies have never worked and while future belief-only policies never will, except maybe by accident.
As to gaining pubic acceptance of my definitive differentiation of the above dichotomies, I recognised that reality stimulates our imaginations through our senses to rational beliefs as to its nature; that these beliefs are transformable to positive or negative knowledge of this reality by evaluation of their wider compliance or their non-compliance with it, or to those which can only be accepted, rejected or suspended as beliefs beyond such reality-evaluation in principle or in pro tem practice, but which cannot be accepted as knowledge of reality. On this basis, my book The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge and this website have shown that reality-evaluation of specific beliefs produced the craft and self-knowledge which secured our group-species survival from time immemorial and the science, engineering and technology which enhanced our physical welfare from the seventeenth century onwards, while our knowledge-only development of social cohesion was variously disrupted by conflicting religious beliefs, by knowledge-rejecting secular beliefs, or by the reactions of ignored reality in ways which belief is unable to anticipate and avert. As to the absence of my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation from all media commentaries on current affairs, I have been using it in the Commentary Section of this website in order to reveal the confusion which arises from its absence and the futility of all efforts to reach conclusions without it, in order to demonstrate that the debate of opinion/counter-opinion is never more than the debate of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/or news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge of reality, and that all that is produced by such debate is an elective belief-consensus pending yet more debate.
To support the necessity of adopting my newly definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy as set out in Chapter 1 of the above book and this website, Chapter 2 of the book went on to show the benefits of doing so by recalling how our innate capacity for this reality-evaluation of belief to knowledge created our craftsmanship and social structures from time immemorial to the Iron Age, while Chapter 3 outlined the futility of our search for knowledge through rationality alone. Chapter 4 then showed how contending religious beliefs beyond reality-evaluation in principle, were resolved to orthodoxies only by successive Imperial Roman Edicts, while Chapters 5, 6 and 7 showed how religious and secular beliefs which touch on reality were gradually resolvable by reality-evaluation, initially by direct observation of reality and later by the cause/effect experimentation which initiated and developed physicochemical science. Thereafter, chapter 8 showed how physicochemical science transformed craftsmanship to technology and engineering and provided other sciences with deeper knowledge than the directly observable, while Chapter 9 showed the extent to which physicochemical science has so far explained the evolution of Universe, Earth and Life and how it took technology and engineering to their current levels, while Chapter 10 showed philosophy to be belief in its rejection of reality-evaluation, and while Chapter 11 showed how the secular now legislatively implement arbitrary interpretations of belief in equality, freedom, rights and environmentalism to the extent of corrupting commonsense, general and specific knowledge and even the scientific method of cause/effect experimentation itself, in ways never attempted by the religious. Finally, Chapter 12 showed the extent to which knowledge could harmonise religion with secularism, environmentalism with science, technology and engineering, and economics with commonsense, and how belief-only politics could be replaced with its knowledge-only alternative to the benefit of all both at home and abroad, provided only that available knowledge replaces belief in all future policy-making and provided that belief-only policy is not implemented until the belief can be replaced with positive or negative knowledge newly acquired to this end. 31/8/20.