Reinforced Dogmatism

File this under Oddments. A favorite passage from Sir Karl Popper:

"In chapter 15 of The Open Society and Its Enemies, when dealing with 'Vulgar Marxism', I mentioned a tendency which can be observed in a group of modern philosophies, the tendency to unveil the hidden motives behind our actions. The sociology of knowledge belongs to this group, together with psychoanalysis and certain philosophies which unveil the 'meaninglessness' of the tenets of their opponents. The popularity of these views lies, I believe, in the ease with which they can be applied, and in the satisfaction which they confer on those who see through things, and through the follies of the unenlightened. This pleasure would be harmless, were it not that all these ideas are liable to destroy the intellectual basis of any discussion, by establishing what I have called a 're-inforced dogmatism'. (Indeed, this is something rather simlar to a 'total ideology'.) Hegelianism does it be declaring the admissibility and even fertility of contradictions... the psychoanalyst can always explain away objections by showing they are due to the repressions of the critic... the philosophers of meaning, again, need only point out what their opponents hold is meaningless, which will always be true, since 'meaninglessness' can be so defined that any discussion about it is by definition without meaning. Marxists, in like manner, are accustomed to explain the disagreement of an opponent by his class bias, and the sociologists of knowledge by his total ideology. Such methods are both easy to handle and good fun for those that handle them. But they clearly destroy the basis of rational discussion, and they must lead, to anti-rationalism and mysticism." -- Karl Popper, Against the Sociology of Knowledge (1945).