[M]y alarm goes off when [Anonymous Liberal] writes about "those [of] us left in the empirical world." Really? You really do think you live in the empirical world? Mind you, everybody believes that he sees the world as it really is, but I am struck by how confident people are that they can't possibly be missing something, that they and their tribe have all the answers, and don't have to consider how their own biases distort reality. Put another way, I'd be interested to know what counts for "empirical" in Anonymous Liberal's world.
He stresses the virtue of intellectual humility:
[W]hile it is undoubtedly true that not all visions of reality are equally valid -- there is not, for example, a Goodyear blimp floating in the air outside my office window, and someone who insisted that there was would plainly be mad -- we should be cautious about asserting the triumphant truth of our own way of seeing the world. We don't always know what we think we know, and we never know what we don't know.