DOUBT IN AN AGE OF DOGMA

Under the old rule of the Sanhedrin, a man convicted by every single judge walked free. Seventy-one votes for guilt, and the court released him. The reasoning was not mercy. It was quality control. If nobody on the bench could find a word to say for the accused, then nobody had been looking, and a court that has stopped looking is not a court. Unanimity was treated as a sign that the instrument had broken. Modern life produces unanimity by the hour, and we treat it as proof. This book argues that our century is not less dogmatic than the ones we condescend to, merely better dressed. A dogma, properly defined, is not a false belief or a strongly held one. It is a claim whose correction channel has been unplugged: it forbids nothing, nobody can say what would count against it, and its mistakes are paid for by someone else. By that definition, the confident, the credentialed, the contrarian, and the person who has done their own research are all equally eligible. Boris Kriger takes the cover of his own book as the first defendant. A reader who picks up something called Doubt in an Age of Dogma has already been flattered - doubt is us, dogma is them - and that is one undefended belief acquired in three seconds. What follows is an attempt to take it back, and to put something usable in its place: doubt as a procedure with a price, a method, and a closing date, rather than a personality trait or a pose. Along the way it prosecutes the professional skeptic, who is a dogmatist with a minus sign, and defends the closing of questions, which is how anything ever gets done. Written with wit, without equations, and with the author placed in the dock alongside everyone else, this is a field manual for anyone who suspects that changing one's mind has quietly become the most expensive thing a person can do. Keywords: intellectual humility, critical thinking, epistemology, ideological certainty, changing your mind, echo chambers, scientific skepticism