In the modern West, the liberal, scientific view of knowledge has asserted a unique claim to legitimacy, and that is a form of intellectual imperialism, as is any person’s or system’s claim to special legitimacy in sorting true beliefs from false ones.

Contrary to what many have said, liberal science does not obliterate the world of the soul and the spirit. It does, however, delimit it and then leave it alone. It does so because it must. The alternative is to put nonadjudicable private beliefs at the top of the public agenda, thus destroying the peace and wasting intellectual capital on fruitless

Within the question of what knowledge is and how it can be had, another question is coiled: Who, if anyone, can claim to have knowledge, and under what circumstances? When is it legitimate for me to say “I’m right and you’re wrong!” and to act accordingly? This is the problem which Plato was grappling with in The Republic and elsewhere: in a world

A society which has accepted skeptical principles will accept that sincere criticism is always legitimate. In other words, if any belief may be wrong, then no one can legitimately claim to have ended any discussion—ever. In other words: No one gets the final say.

The truth is that liberal science insists absolutely on freedom of belief and speech, but freedom of knowledge it rejects absolutely.

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

The subject of epistemology is the nature and limits of human knowledge. Or, as Senator Howard Baker did not quite ask during the Watergate hearings, “What can one know and when can one know it?”

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

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