In a liberal society, knowledge—not belief—is the rolling critical consensus of a decentralized community of checkers, and it is nothing else.

To believe incorrectly is never a crime, but simply to believe is never to have knowledge. In other words, liberal science does not restrict belief, but it does restrict knowledge. It absolutely protects freedom of belief and speech, but it absolutely denies freedom of knowledge: in liberal science, there is positively no right to have one’s opinio

Plato believed that empowering a wise central authority was the surest way to make certain that truth prevailed over nonsense. What he failed to realize—or maybe did realize but did not say—was that in an authoritarian intellectual regime the advantage goes to the people with the most troops, not the people with the keenest critical eyes. “Truth” i

This is the morality of the Fundamentalist Principle: he who would deny evident truth should be punished.

Intellectual conformity is a social value. Sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by twisting arms or breaking them, everyone encourages everyone else not to doubt, not to criticize. The common text and common authority knit the group together. If you search for error, you endanger the peace.

This is the fundamentalist way: rule by the right-thinking, exclusion and (if necessary) elimination of the wrong-thinking.

In a radically fundamentalist culture, people become obsessed with their fixed beliefs and utterly dependent upon them. The world outside the text is a dark upheaval of argument and ignorance, an uproar of hypotheses that the text cannot encompass and of disputes that the text cannot settle. And so the outside world is denied, and the text is assum

It was Peirce, in his magnificent essay “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), who showed how what I call the fundamentalist intellectual style is quite separate from religion. His phrase “fixation of belief” went to the heart of what fundamentalism is about. The fundamentalist temperament tends to search for certainty rather than for errors. The fundame

to some extent we are all fundamentalists, each and every one of us. We are all true believers in something. What distinguishes the ethic of liberal science is not that liberals are undogmatic; it is that liberals believe they must check their beliefs, or submit them for checking, however sure they feel.