Article 39
My Response To Toby Young’s Free Speech Union.
I commend this Union’s objective of driving the Woke from the contention-field but I do not share Toby Young’s confidence in attaining this objective by merely advocating free-speech, because the Woke’s beliefs are guaranteed the same freedom of speech as those of the Union which aims to suppress them. However, I have shown that this circularity of belief/counter-belief can be broken; and that belief and counter-belief can both be suppressed by debate-terminating conclusive knowledge, now that I have differentiated the knowledge/belief dichotomy for the first time ever. This I did because throughout my civil service career which extended from my recruitment grade of senior scientific officer and from my choice of employment at Warren Spring Laboratory (WSL) of the then DTI, through my successive promotions to the grade of chief scientific officer as director of WSL, and which had previously included seven years in a DTI policy division at the grade of senior principle scientific officer, I had become progressively aware of the need for such differentiation by observing that policy-formulating administrative grades, politicians, the public, and even my scientific colleagues were never consciously aware of its absence from time immemorial; that consequently politics has never been more than the implementation of belief or counter-belief whichever political party happened to be in power; that such belief-only policies have never delivered their objectives in reality, and never will, whichever belief-only political party implements them; that the debates of opinion/counter-opinion are merely debates of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence or news/false-news, no set of which is ever debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; and that the outcome is never more than a transient belief-consensus pending resumption of the debate to yet another belief-consensus and so on ad infinitum.
With this need for knowledge/belief differentiation in mind, and having requested early retirement with the intention of becoming an independent knowledge-only industrial/environmental consultant, I concluded on further reflection, that reality stimulates our imaginations through our senses to rational beliefs as to the nature of the reality in which we exist; that these beliefs are transformable to positive or negative knowledge by further experiential evaluation of their compliance or non-compliance with this reality, or to those which can only be accepted, rejected or suspended as beliefs beyond this reality-evaluation in pro tem practice or in principle, but which can not to be accepted as knowledge. Thus, having already written one book at the invitation of Elsevier on the knowledge already acquired by WSL through its application of the scientific method of experimentation (further reality-evaluation of beliefs as hypotheses), and which ought to have been seen to reality-refute at least some environmentalist beliefs, and having subsequently updated that book at the invitation of Kluwer Academic which meanwhile had acquired Elsevier’s business-interest in industrial impact/non-impact on the environment. However, when these books did not dispel environmentalist beliefs in any observable way, I wrote a third book which definitively differentiated the knowledge/belief dichotomy for the first time ever, and with it those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad, which I chose to publish on the basis of print-on-demand. However, with no publisher-publicity of this third book’s existence, there was no significant demand, though it is available from Amazon and book shops on request. It is entitled, The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge.
On the basis of my then newly definitive reality-evaluation of belief to positive or negative knowledge (compliance or non-compliance with reality), my third book demonstrated how this reality-evaluation of specific beliefs, as hypotheses, produced the cause-effect craft- and self-knowledge which secured our group-species survival from time immemorial, and the cause/effect science, engineering, and process technology which enhanced our welfare from the seventeenth century onwards to the present day and how this reality-validated knowledge-only element of our social cohesion was meanwhile variously disrupted by religious beliefs in the Beyond, (beyond reality-evaluation in principle), by knowledge-rejecting secular beliefs, and/or by the reactions of ignored reality in ways which belief cannot anticipate or avert. Thus, having achieved this newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation, I now seek to ensure that secular beliefs, whether previously implemented or not, will now be reality-validated to positive knowledge or reality-refuted to negative knowledge for implementation of the former and rejection of the latter; that acceptance of the latter will be seen to lead nowhere other than to belief-driven violence, revolution, and war; and to ensure that such beliefs can be seen to corrupt economic, behavioural, and environmental sciences to the pseudo-science now responsible for deteriorating personal behaviour, diminishing social cohesion, recurring financial crises, and un-certainty of material and energy supply by diverting resources from real to unreal problems.
Thus, my newly definitive reality-evaluation of belief to positive or negative knowledge, can now enable the voting public to conclude that our current maladies can be rectified only by a ubiquitous recognition that knowledge-only policies conducive to our group-species survival and to our social and physical welfare can now be recognised as right and good; that their counter-beliefs can now be recognised as wrong and bad; that political manifestos can now start to prioritise knowledge-only policy options; that the public can now start to recognise any belief-only policies as arising from a pro tem absence of knowledge; that this Change can render continuous our otherwise disrupted progress; that consequently my newly definitive reality-evaluation not only differentiates the knowledge/belief dichotomy, but also those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad; that the debate of opinion/counter-opinion is merely the debate of belief/counter-belief respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence, and news/false-news, no set of which is debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that debate produces nothing more than one or other transient belief-consensus pending the resumption of the debate to yet another transient belief-consensus, and so on, ad infinitum; that consequently freedom of speech can produce nothing useful, when all that is spoken of is belief and counter-belief; and that the time saved by terminating all such debate could be spent in replacing belief with knowledge in policy areas where it is already available but ignored, and in acquiring knowledge where it is needed but not yet available. 15/01/2021.