Article 55

The Replacement Of Belief With knowledge In Future Policy-making.

The two previous sections of this website have sequentially reviewed my experience of civil service failure to recognise conclusive knowledge of our experienced reality as being preferable to its own internal debates of belief/counter-belief, and have demonstrated that while political commentators recognise something is amiss, none of them know how to correct it; and that consequently, they merely perpetuate the political debate of opinion/counter-opinion which is never more than the debate of belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence, and news/false-news, no set of which is ever belief-terminating conclusive knowledge of our experienced reality. Consequently, the third section of this website will exemplify how all party-specific belief-only policies could and should be replaced with conclusive knowledge-only alternatives in the manner in which craft knowledge has developed from observation of the compliance or non-compliance of hypothetical belief with reality since time immemorial and in which physico-chemical science has developed its knowledge from hypothetical belief by cause-effect observation of reality, since the eighteenth century, while the miss-named Enlightenment continued to believe that the rational critique of belief/counter-belief produces knowledge through debate, when it merely produces one or other electively transient belief-consensus pending the resumption of the debate to, as likely as not, an elective consensus for the counter-belief; that this has been going on since before and after Socrates had argued that such debate is futile, and for his failure to convince his contemporaries, he drank the proffered hemlock over 2000 years ago.

At this point, I ask, is it still not possible for me to convince my contemporaries of this futility some 2000 years later? Socrates could only contrast belief/counter-belief with the then knowledge of craftsmanship, he himself, being a stonemason, while I and my contemporaries can compare all currently debated beliefs-counter-beliefs with the knowledge which is craftsmanship, engineering and science, acquired since his day. Surely, the wonderment is that we have not yet collectively compared and contrasted all of our thus acquired knowledge with our otherwise persistent reliance on belief and/or counter-belief. Surely, the active acceptance of my newly definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy and with it those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad, and its practical implementation in all policy-making is now long overdue. If, I can’t get a general acceptance of these definitive differentiations and their application in all future policy-making, through this website, perhaps I’ll consider the hemlock option.

In the meantime, it is my intention that the third section of this website will identify a range of belief-only policy areas which could immediately become knowledge-only areas, the relevant knowledge being already available but currently ignored, and those in need of further knowledge- acquisition and which ought to be suspended until the missing knowledge is acquired by submitting its underlying belief or counter-belief to the observation of its cause-effect or its non-cause-effect relationship to reality, as is done in cause-effect craftsmanship and in cause-effect science. The second section of this website has already introduced some of these belief-only policies in my demonstration that while some press commentators recognise that all is not well with the policies on which they choose to comment, they do not know how to correct them other than through the ‘rational debate’ which Socrates sought to show (through debate) to be futile. However, he was nearly there when he observed that the demos (for example) might listen to a debate on whether or not to build a temple and vote to build it; but that on listening on the next day to another debate on the same question with different debaters, they could well vote not to build it. Again, in further attempting to show that debate was thus futile, he concluded his demonstration by stating that if the demos decided to build a temple, a stonemason would be needed, i.e. someone who actually knewhow to build it; and that knowledge is thus distinguishable from debatable belief and opinion. However, he had no effect on his listeners and has had no effect since. I hope to do better with my readers, though it remains to be seen how many readers I will have for this website. 21/5/21.