Have you ever encountered someone who was so caught up in a self-referential ideology that there seemed to be no way to get them to escape from it? A person for whom every bit of counter-evidence and every counter-argument was rationalized away from within the system itself? I'm sure you have and there's a name for that: an intellectual black hole.
And if you become too successful at challenging a person's intellectual black hole, you risk them going "nuclear" to protect it.
Stephen Law says in an interview:
Intellectual black holes are belief systems that draw people in and hold them captive so they become willing slaves of claptrap. Belief in homeopathy, psychic powers, alien abductions - these are examples of intellectual black holes. As you approach them, you need to be on your guard because if you get sucked in, it can be extremely difficult to think your way clear again. ...
When someone is cornered in an argument, they may decide to get sceptical about reason. They might say: "Ah, but reason is just another faith position." I call this " going nuclear" because it lays waste to every position. It brings every belief - that milk can make you fly or that George Bush was Elvis Presley in disguise down to the same level so they all appear equally "reasonable" or "unreasonable".
Of course, you can be sure that the moment this person has left the room, they will continue to use reason to support their case if they can, and will even trust their life to reason: trusting that the brakes on their car will work or that a particular drug is going to cure them.
There is a classic philosophical puzzle about how to justify reason: to do so, it seems you have to use reason. So the justification is circular - a bit like trusting a second -hand car salesman because he says he's trustworthy.
But the person who "goes nuclear" isn't genuinely sceptical about reason. They are just raising a philosophical problem as a smokescreen, to give them time to leave with their head held high, saying: "So my belief is as reasonable as yours." That's intellectually dishonest.
Source: New Scientist, June 11, 2011
Of course, every system is at least somewhat self-referential. Science itself, for example, depends in part on comparing new data to old data and one of the tests for the validity of new ideas is how well they fit with older, established theories. A new theory that contradicts older, established theories is assumed to probably be wrong.
The reason why science doesn't become an intellectual black hole is that it retains an important, non-self-referential touchstone: reality itself. Yes, new theories that fit with older theories will start out as being more acceptable, but in the end both new and old theories must also fit with the data. A new theory that fits the data better will be accepted, no matter how many older theories it conflicts with. It might take some time, but it will come out on top.
Intellectual black holes don't have this. They ignore, rationalize, or explain away contradictory data. People have a commitment to an ideology and so work to make the data conform to that ideology. They are not in the business of creating theories to better explain and understand that data at hand. That's what science is -- a commitment to the real world and developing explanations to help us understand that world. It's why science is not itself an ideology.
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