Series 2025-02
The Perils of Certainty
By Mu-Jeong Kho
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4545-8731
Email: khomujeong@yahoo.co.uk
To state my position - and here with deliberate emphasis - I contend that those who most damage the world are the dogmatic monists, the fundamentalists, and the extremists. While philosophical monism, in its abstract and methodological sense, may serve legitimate purposes in metaphysics or epistemology, it becomes corrosive when transposed into a prescriptive exclusivism that brooks no alternative. As Isaiah Berlin’s theory of value pluralism makes clear, human values are irreducibly multiple and often incommensurable; any attempt to collapse them into a single, all-encompassing truth risks authoritarianism and violence (Berlin, 1990). In my view, maturity is defined by the cumulative layering of experience until experience itself becomes a habitual condition of being. From such a vantage point, any individual who insists upon a single idea as though it were the sole truth under heaven must be approached with great caution, however noble or beautiful that idea might appear.
Thomas Aquinas once observed: The most dangerous person is the one who has read only a single book (Aquinas, trans. 1947). John Stuart Mill offered a parallel caution in On Liberty, contending that those who know only their own side of a case know little of that case in its entirety (Mill, 2022). Both Berlin and Mill underscore that intellectual confinement - whether produced by ideological exclusivity or informational isolation - undermines the very capacities required for sound judgement in a pluralistic society (Berlin, 2013; Mill, 2022). In my estimation, it is sometimes preferable not to read at all than to read only one book and thereafter speak of nothing else for a lifetime. The ideal, of course, is the cultivation of intellectual breadth: to read widely, to engage with diverse perspectives, and to remain open to the provisional nature of one’s own conclusions - what contemporary epistemologists term ‘epistemic humility’ (Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, & Howard-Snyder, 2017). Yet there are those who declare, “This is my book for life!” or “I place my trust solely in this text”, repeating it endlessly. Here, the “book” functions merely as an illustrative example; the same intellectual closure may manifest in relation to a fixed idea, a single doctrine, or a habitual mode of reasoning.
I regard such a mindset as profoundly dangerous. It should be treated as axiomatic in any genuinely pluralistic society that a value one person holds dear may, to another, be of little significance, and conversely, that a value cherished by another may hold no meaning for oneself. This recognition lies at the heart of Rawls’s conception of “reasonable pluralism” in Political Liberalism, which accepts the inevitability of deep moral and philosophical disagreement in a free society (Rawls, 1993). Without such recognition, constructive communication - in a society where individuals must both compete and collaborate with those possessing a vast range of perspectives - becomes not merely difficult but impossible.
If one holds the conviction that one’s own value system is exclusively correct, then what remains but to attempt to impose it upon others? And if those others resist? The inevitable consequence is conflict, if not outright war. What is required, therefore, is the principled recognition of difference: an acknowledgment that disagreement is not merely tolerable but a constitutive element of a healthy democratic order. In this light, pluralism should be understood not as a reluctant concession to diversity but as an affirmative political virtue that sustains the legitimacy and resilience of democratic institutions (Rawls, 1993; Berlin, 2013). The world remains uncertain; we seldom possess absolute clarity as to which value, if any, is ultimately “right”. Accordingly, genuine dialogue and meaningful cooperation must rest on the recognition - deeply and sincerely made - that others may think differently, and that such difference is neither a flaw to be corrected nor an impediment to be removed, but rather a constitutive feature of our shared human condition and the essential precondition for a vibrant, resilient public sphere.
End.
References
Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa Theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). New York: Benziger Brothers. (Original work published ca. 1265–1274)
Berlin, I. (2013). The crooked timber of humanity: Chapters in the history of ideas. Princeton University Press.
Mill, J. S. (2022). The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. DigiCat.
Rawls, J. (1993). Political liberalism. Columbia University Press.
Whitcomb, D., Battaly, H., Baehr, J., & Howard-Snyder, D. (2017). Intellectual humility: Owning our limitations. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94(3), 509–539.
One should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form:
Kho, Mu-Jeong. (2025, August 14). The perils of certainty [Blog article]. IPEAD Insights: Letters on Economics, Politics, and Philosophy [online]. Series 2025-02. Retrieved from https://mujeongkho.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-perils-of-certainty.html [PDF download]
© 2025 Mu-Jeong Kho. All Rights Reserved.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). You are free to share this work (copy and
redistribute the material in any medium or format) under the following terms:
- Attribution - You must give
appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were
made.
- NonCommercial - You may not use
the material for commercial purposes.
- NoDerivatives - If you remix,
transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified
material.
License details:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/