"If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad"
About this Quote
Eysenck’s line carries the clipped impatience of a scientist who’s spent too long watching ideology cosplay as evidence. “Too bad” is the tell: it’s not just a defense of truth, it’s a refusal to perform sympathy for beliefs that want to be treated like facts. The sentence is built like a door slammed in a debate. No hedging, no appeals to consensus, no polite detour through feelings. Truth is the fixed point; the believer is the variable.
The intent is disciplinary. Eysenck is policing the boundary between what can be wished and what can be shown. “Deeply held beliefs” is a deliberately soft phrase for a hard target: commitments that feel moral, personal, even identity-forming. By choosing that wording, he acknowledges their psychological grip while stripping them of epistemic authority. The subtext is almost behaviorist: your attachment to an idea is itself data, but it’s not an argument.
Context matters because Eysenck’s career sat in the crosswinds where psychology meets politics. He championed unpopular, often incendiary claims about personality, intelligence, and heredity, and he drew fierce criticism for methods and associations as well as conclusions. Read through that history, the quote becomes both credo and shield: a principled stand for falsifiability, but also a preemptive move against moral outrage as a substitute for refutation.
That tension is why it works. It’s bracing in an era of motivated reasoning, and unsettling because it invites the next question: whose “truth,” produced by which institutions, under what biases? Eysenck isn’t answering that. He’s asserting the priority of evidence, then daring you to keep up.
The intent is disciplinary. Eysenck is policing the boundary between what can be wished and what can be shown. “Deeply held beliefs” is a deliberately soft phrase for a hard target: commitments that feel moral, personal, even identity-forming. By choosing that wording, he acknowledges their psychological grip while stripping them of epistemic authority. The subtext is almost behaviorist: your attachment to an idea is itself data, but it’s not an argument.
Context matters because Eysenck’s career sat in the crosswinds where psychology meets politics. He championed unpopular, often incendiary claims about personality, intelligence, and heredity, and he drew fierce criticism for methods and associations as well as conclusions. Read through that history, the quote becomes both credo and shield: a principled stand for falsifiability, but also a preemptive move against moral outrage as a substitute for refutation.
That tension is why it works. It’s bracing in an era of motivated reasoning, and unsettling because it invites the next question: whose “truth,” produced by which institutions, under what biases? Eysenck isn’t answering that. He’s asserting the priority of evidence, then daring you to keep up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
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