about the four hundred and fiftieth year of his age, or latter end of his childhood, he dissected a great number of small insects not more than one hundred feet in diameter, which are not perceivable by ordinary microscopes, of which he composed a very curious treatise, which involved him in some trouble – Voltaire
The following tentative worldview is clearly influenced by aspects of atheistic existentialism and summarizes a mode of thinking prior to my discovery of linguistic philosophy, and in particular the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I am in the process of immersing myself in the variegated world of linguistic philosophy in a somewhat chronological order. Time will tell how much of the present worldview remains.
Belief precedes essence by default of man’s epistemological condition; insofar as we know the truth of something we are asserting a belief. For the sake of my present purposes I will call this meta-belief the ‘doctrine of free-belief’. The doctrine of free-belief is rationally irrefutable, or at least irrefutable to a form of logic that is uninhibited. Of course with provisional logic, like that used in mathematics and science, most anything can be refuted nominally within a provisionary bubble safe from real scrutiny. Philosophically speaking, DFB remains rationally irrefutable.
To the extent we need to speak of these concepts logically, ‘doublethink’ is the application of the paradoxical inherent in the doctrine of free-belief, where surpassing the authority of logic itself a plurality of belief-systems can co-exist in an individual without error or discomfort. The key point of this is that we do not need to think of these things logically, and therefore the capacity for doublethink is not genuinely paradoxical, but is rather the inevitable result of the human condition.
This said however, by extension of the ‘doctrine of free-belief’ the individual is able to compartmentalize beliefs and work within self-consistent belief-systems in order to derive regulated doctrines which are socially transferable. i.e. Euclidean geometry can be socially supported and its applications independently verified, but its value is forever dependent on personal faith in its rationally indefensible first axioms.
Due to the emphasis on concerted effort in managing self-consistent belief-systems these acts depend on abstract thought. That is to say they are limiting of man’s capacities for belief so to impose order, which is an abstraction of the potentialities inherent in the doctrine of free-belief. Thus abstract thought cannot definitively explain the happenings of the mind, because it is provisional, although it can have the appearance of objectivity through personal faith, but belief is individual, and insofar as it is objective in this respect it remains individualistic when demanding others to agree also.
Logic is a meta-belief contingent to the ‘doctrine of free-belief’ (the meta-meta-belief). Any number of threads can be conceived from this origin source, even threads which in their believed existence deny the existence of DFB, hence the rise of ideologies and potential fanaticism. Rationally articulated ideologies can be undermined by playing out their logical dependence to DFB
Posts on Doublethink: