"Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements"
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Wright is picking a fight with the 19th-century cult of “only facts,” and he does it with the cool restraint of someone who knows the zealots will overplay their hand. The sentence is engineered to look like a concession - yes, evidence matters - before it quietly widens the aperture: not all belief is manufactured by the sort of evidence positivism certifies. He’s less interested in dunking on science than in diagnosing a philosophical overreach: the slide from “this method works spectacularly in physics” to “this is the only respectable road to confidence, for everyone, about everything.”
The barb is in that final clause: “as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.” Wright is suspicious of consensus when it’s treated as a machine. Positivism, in his telling, doesn’t merely describe how people come to believe; it prescribes a social program of synchronization, where confidence is legitimate only when it can be standardized across “all minds.” That’s a tell. The target isn’t evidence but an ideology of evidence that smuggles in coercion: if agreement is the goal, dissent becomes a kind of pathology.
Context matters. Wright is writing in the shadow of Comtean positivism and the era’s faith in scientific authority, when “objectivity” starts to look like a civic religion. His intent is to defend the messy ecology of human conviction - moral judgment, aesthetic experience, even metaphysical hunches - without collapsing into anti-rationalism. The subtext: a society that grants dignity only to what can be collectively verified risks shrinking its imagination, and confusing intellectual hygiene with intellectual freedom.
The barb is in that final clause: “as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.” Wright is suspicious of consensus when it’s treated as a machine. Positivism, in his telling, doesn’t merely describe how people come to believe; it prescribes a social program of synchronization, where confidence is legitimate only when it can be standardized across “all minds.” That’s a tell. The target isn’t evidence but an ideology of evidence that smuggles in coercion: if agreement is the goal, dissent becomes a kind of pathology.
Context matters. Wright is writing in the shadow of Comtean positivism and the era’s faith in scientific authority, when “objectivity” starts to look like a civic religion. His intent is to defend the messy ecology of human conviction - moral judgment, aesthetic experience, even metaphysical hunches - without collapsing into anti-rationalism. The subtext: a society that grants dignity only to what can be collectively verified risks shrinking its imagination, and confusing intellectual hygiene with intellectual freedom.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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