How to manage conflict of belief is, I submit, a problem that every society must somehow solve. Upon the solution chosen depends, not only social peace and cohesion, but also the structure of our most important industry: the reality industry. That industry is charged with producing true statements about the external world. Its mission is to tell us

But the name of the game is to make knowledge and score credit for it, and you get credit only when your conclusions are checked out by others. Others must be able to rely on your conclusions, confirm your results, trace your logic, get hold of your data. So the game of science forces you to build bridges. You must persuade.

We will pay a heavy price if the principle takes root in our ethical code that the offended, having been hurt, have the right to an apology and to redress. It is crucial to understand that the Humanitarian Principle is deadly—inherently deadly, not incidentally so—to intellectual freedom and to the productive and peaceful pursuit of knowledge. The

What about the foolish crank or the irresponsible hatemonger? By giving those people free rein, doesn’t liberal science tacitly encourage verbal outrages and irresponsible sloganeering? Not really. Quietly but inexorably working in the science game is the disciplinary mechanism of marginalization. Though the rules of the game do not allow

allowing mistakes is risky, suppressing them is much riskier, because then a “mistake” becomes whatever it is that the authorities don’t like to hear. Suppressing offensiveness, too, comes at a high cost, since offensiveness is not the same thing as wrongness—often just the contrary. Sometimes patently “offensive” verbiage turns out to be telling

For “opinions divorced from knowledge,” says Plato with disgust, “are ugly things” (506c). Woe unto the country where the truth is drowned out by the racket of false opinions, where the citizens “lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things,” the jungles and quicksands of errors and misperceptions.

in the cause of a principle: that you are not entitled to hurt me or others with words or ideas. You should not inflict pain and suffering on others with ideas and talk any more than with clubs and knives.

Epistemology—one’s view of who can have knowledge and when—is politics, and it has the profoundest practical consequences.

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