nonetheless, to witness the entire cognitive process of the author, as misguided as you find their conclusions, is a positive constructive experience isn't it?

IMO, the main point of the article is to assert that in some fields (medicine and science) this "assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality" is needed, and that to do away with this 'assumption' is 'irrational' and sends one down the path towards authoritarianism.

This involves more epistemology than usual

> this "assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality" is needed, and that to do away with this 'assumption' is 'irrational' and sends one down the path towards authoritarianism.

When you understand that the author is ok with authoritarianism so long as it validates his symbolic universe because it's draped in the fineries of rationalism, the sooner the piece clicks. The author is fine with authoritarianism so long as its his authoritarianism and he doesn't get to call it authoritarianism, he gets to call it reality. To him it is reality and anyone disagreeing with him is denying reality. When we talk about the most insidious delusions, it's his. It's intellectual narcissism. And that's why it's epistemologically vacuous.

Anyone who's studied epistomology knows he's arguing from within a system instead of outside it and it comes across as naive realism because it is.

on the other hand, this same pattern of "authoritarianism" is what we all learn to have when becoming adult members of our societies/cultures: it's an expression of one persons' individual consciousness with the ability to control their own behavior.

this gets weird when projecting our individual consciousness into the systems we construct to rule over ourselves (governments)... better known as our tendency (and capacity) to anthropomorphize anything.

No, I'm not talking about anthropomorphizing. I'm talking about reification.

And no, authoritarianism is not synonymous with the social contract. Sorry. Maybe in some minds, but no.

Ideology is not always a way of interpreting the real into the symbolic. In fact, ideology has nothing to do with symbols. Ideology is defined as an account of ideas. An account can be communicated verbally or even by tactilely. Those who claim their narrative should be held true by the recipient are idealogues with the implication being that greater consequences should follow than for those who do not make such claims. The implicitness of such claims being culturally dependent. The scientific perspective tries to avoid such assumptions. An example of ideology that would make an idealogue a hypocrite is: This sentence is false.