From Mind-Reading to Justificationism: On the Possibility of Founding the Soroushian Sect

One must not confuse two different statements. One statement concerns Mr. Soroush's intention and purpose regarding what Mr. Naraghi and Mr. Ganji call "founding a new sect or religious creed." The other statement is that one of the unintended consequences of the totality of Mr. Soroush's views could be "the founding of a new sect or religious creed." The former is mind-reading, but the latter is a claim whose strengths and weaknesses require demonstrating external reasons and emerging successfully from the passage of critical tests. Mind-reading in this arena leads nowhere. Making mind-reading claims in criticizing someone is like throwing clods of earth, the reward or response to which, if not patience and silence, may be stones, more or less like what Mr. Soroush himself has offered in response to the third question about Mr. Naraghi's note in the following post:

Question: A piece by Dr. Arash Naraghi has been published accusing you of sect-building. Have you given a response anywhere on this matter? Response from Dr. Soroush: Pay no attention to those slanders. He has unfortunately been treading this crooked path for some time now.

But the second claim can be examined in various ways. One of the weakest, most unreliable, and indeed most misleading ways of examining this claim is precisely what Mr. Ganji has done in his recent article titled "Soroush's Claim to Prophethood and the Promise of the 'Soroushieh Sect' Becoming Global," that is, in addition to mind-reading, using the method of "justificationism" to "prove" a claim.

Justificationism, in short, means taking a claim, for instance about someone, and setting out to gather from various sources, including from within that person's works and views, all the instances consistent with that claim, piling them up one after another, and finally adding a new claim to the initial one: "Our claim has been proven." The reason? "Our claim is consistent with all these excerpts we have brought from that person's works."

Unfortunately, contrary to the misleading appearance of this method, "justificationism" in no way leads to the "proof" of any claim, and at most "strengthens" it, and that too under certain conditions, among which is that the selective quotations must have been chosen and read methodically, not severed from the context of the text, and not misinterpreted contrary to the atmosphere of the text and other explicit statements within it.

Justificationism, which is a form of induction and produces only pseudo-arguments, is one of the common fallacies in the realm of reasoning. The critique that reveals the vacuity of the justificationists' argument is this: why do justificationists ignore all the evidence against their claim within the works and views of that same person, and biasedly and selectively pile up only those instances that are consistent with their claim? If justificationists were familiar with the correct path and method of research, they would methodically and comprehensively extract the confirming and refuting evidence and instances for their claim from within that person's works, place them side by side, and fairly try, using the general and specific rules of reading any text, to discover the course of the evolution and development of that person's views, identify the contradictions within the text, draw out that person's intellectual orientation through the conflicts and contradictions within their texts, and instead of an inductive judgment, answer this question of every critical study: "If our research hypothesis about so-and-so's views is incorrect, how, through reading their texts and works, would we become aware of the incorrectness of our hypothesis?" Not to base their entire research on this question: "What evidence can we extract from within their views to justify our claim?" The degree of commitment to each of these two questions determines the galactic distance between hasty journalism and the critical historiography of ideas.

Apart from mind-reading and justificationism, both of which are corrupt methods, whether a person's body of ideas can lead to the founding of a new sect or not cannot, in principle, be a text-based research question. Perhaps the views of Mr. Soroush or anyone else may one day inspire the founding of a sect, or they may not. But the founding of sects and the emergence of spiritual paths are intensely sociological, political, and economic phenomena; that is, they are a function of circumstances, conditions, and situations, none of which can be grasped by reading the intentions or the texts of one of the past prophets or one of the candidates for prophethood.

Someone whose research question is whether Mr. Soroush's views can lead to the founding of a sect, instead of