Article 40
My Further Response To Toby Young’s Free Speech Union.
Having revealed in Article 39, the circularity of the Free Speech Union’s thus spurious attempt to argue the benefit of beliefs over their counter-beliefs or vice versa, I must now dispel any impression that yet another circularity is hidden in my claim that the imaginative beliefs stimulated by our sense-perception of reality is transformed to positive or negative knowledge of reality by evaluation of its further experiential compliance with the reality which gave rise to the belief in the first place. I do this by emphasising that the knowledge attained, by this further compliance, is the cause-effect craft and self-knowledge of reality which ensured our group-species survival from time immemorial and the science, engineering and process technology which enhanced our welfare from the seventeenth century onwards; that this cause-effect knowledge is manifest in the causative action of tool-use and its observed effect on the work-piece; that this early craftsmanship led from time immemorial though the ages of stone, bronze and iron, to the present day; that the injunction to do unto others as you would have them do to you, codifies the cause-effect knowledge which harmonises our innate selfishness with our innate need for the cooperative social cohesion on which depends our survival as the group-species we are, and indeed the instinctive cause-effect knowledge which secures the survival of all other group-species; that in contrast, our search for knowledge through rationality alone, to the exclusion of any reference to reality as per metaphysics, has produced precisely nothing of value; and that contending religious beliefs and counter-beliefs beyond resolution by reality-evaluation in principle, were resolved to belief-only orthodoxies by the belief-only Imperial Edicts of successive Roman Emperors.
Thus, my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation shows that both religious and secular beliefs touching on reality are resolvable to positive or negative knowledge only by my newly defined cause-effect validation or refutation by reality, initially by direct observation and later by the designed cause-effect experimentation which led to physicochemical science; that this experimentation enabled the believed (hypothetical) cause to produce the effect or not to produce it, e.g. to show that change in pressure would cause the effect of the change in the volume of a fixed mass of gas; that an apparatus was designed to enable changes in pressure to be applied to a mass of gas enclosed by an adjustable pressure-responsive boundary; to enable the changes in pressure to be applied and measured; to enable the changes in volume to be observed and measured; and to enable the relationship to be expressed as a mathematical equation which enables volumes to be calculated from known pressures and vice versa, ever after; that change in temperature was separately related to change in pressure at constant volume and to change in volume at constant pressure by suitably designed experimental apparatus; that the resulting equations involving pressure, volume and temperature have been known as Boyle’s and Charles’s Laws ever after with no intrusion of counter-belief; that their combined equation is similarly known as the Gas Law; and that science thus isolates the hypothetical cause from all other possible causes and observes changes in magnitude of effect with changes in the magnitude of the cause; that in contrast pseudoscience carries out no such isolation of cause from all other possible causes; that it simply correlates effect with believed cause without demonstrating that it is the cause, in contrast to science as exemplified by the foregoing pressure/volume/temperature experimentation.
Yet again, my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation shows how physicochemical cause-effect science transformed craftsmanship to engineering and process technology, and provided other sciences with deeper knowledge than the directly observable; that for example, it went on to explain the evolution of Universe, Earth and Life to the extent to which we now understand them within our innate capacity to imagine beliefs capable of reality-validation by designed cause-effect experimentation; that in contrast philosophy is pure belief in its reliance on rational thought to the exclusion of reality-evaluation by direct observation or designed experimentation; that the secular now implement arbitrary interpretations of belief in equality, freedom, rights, human relations, environmentalism, economics and much else to the extent of corrupting commonsense, general and specific knowledge and even the scientific method itself in ways never attempted by the religious; but that in contrast, it shows that knowledge can harmonise religion with secularism, environmentalism with industry, and economics with commonsense; and that disillusion with belief-only politics could become enthusiasm for its knowledge-only alternative to the benefit of all at home and abroad; and that the longstanding tendency to call the science of physics ‘natural philosophy’ has been a misleading and inexcusable mistake.
Thus, my response to Toby Young’s attempt to counter the beliefs of the Woke, is to discern that the Woke can simply reply that they too are exercising the same freedom of speech as is advocated by his Union; and that those whom his Union and the Woke seek to recruit will also discern this circularity and act according to their respective beliefs and counter-beliefs with no resolution either way; that were his case to be presented from the vantage point of my knowledge/belief differentiation, potential recruits would see that the knowledge-only side had an indisputable advantage over the belief-only side; that this advantage was first clarified in my print-on-demand Book, The Rational Trinity Imagination, Belief and Knowledge; that the intention of my registered company, Against Belief-Consensus Ltd (ABC for short) was to mount a public campaign for recognition of the need for politicians to replace belief with knowledge in their policy-formulations, there being no single knowledge-only political future; that the intention of this website, douglascormack.co.uk, is to be a reference point for all who wish to bring this Campaign to the attention of their parliamentary and of local council representatives; that party-specific knowledge-only futures are not only possible, they would compatible, so long as all of them have knowledge-only objectives and knowledge-only means of attaining these objectives, and so long as debates and the elections themselves are aimed at cost/benefit choice from knowledge-only alternative policies and their knowledge-only means of achievement. However, were I to commend my newly definitive knowledge-only approach to policy-making to a political party directly, my choice would be UKIP, because this party has a unique advantage over other parties, because even if the others followed suit, they would have to explain their failure to do so earlier, while UKIP as yet uncontaminated with belief-only governmental errors, would be making a unique start, in which I can show Brexit itself to be a knowledge-only alternative to the belief-only EU, while all other parties have treated Brexit/Remain as a belief/counter-belief debate.