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Monday, January 15, 2007

The Curse of the Institute

A curious way of validating knowledge is to treat old knowledge like a dinosaur bone. You dig it up, and since its been around millenia, and you can't change what you find, it must be true. Such was the fate of Aristotle's natural philosophy, which like an old bone dug from a library full of similar literary fossils, was something that could not be denied. Trusting in the wisdom of our ancestors and the sanctity of a tradition of knowledge is a common way to parse inquiry. It's makes things easier while you concentrate on the more pressing problems at hand. Thus, there is no need to reinvent, or should we say re-inquire about the wheel.

When you have fossilized knowledge, you have of course folks who band together to tend to it and perhaps build upon it. This institutionalization of knowledge is something the early Catholic Church did well, and kept too inquisitive folks in line by an Inquisition that was inquisitive about those being a bit too inquisitive. Institutions have a way of shrinking the mystery of the universe by limiting not only what we can but what we should be curious about. Indeed, to question an institutionalized belief is not a mark of curiousity, but insufferable rudeness, even blasphemy.

In psychology, institutions have been replaced with Institutes, clubs of like minded believers who will brook no dissent from the shared wisdom. Institutes have their own journals, their own methods, and their own studies, which prove unquestionably that their core beliefs are correct. To paraphrase Mark Twain's comment on religion, it seems that only in America do we have the true psychology, several hundred of them.

But where is science in this picture? Science of course represents a universal standard of knowing that enshrines the importance of every question, any question. It may be justly said that for a scientific temperament, a belief that cannot be questioned is a belief not worth having. To bad there are few institutes just for that.

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