Rather than seeing this as a (relative, historically contextual) vindication of the inquisition, I rather tend to see it as an argument against excessive dogmat

Rather than seeing this as a (relative, historically contextual) vindication of the inquisition, I rather tend to see it as an argument against excessive dogmatism and intolerance toward speculation in science regardless of motive. I don't agree completely with either of these, but I find myself generally sympathetic especially with the first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Inquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Inquisition Note that I'm not arguing for the extreme opposite position either -- that we should give equal consideration to every hypothesis however outlandish. I'm just skeptical of excessively dogmatic and totalistic pretensions to certainty. Science is hard. Edit: I believe an argument for the thesis of "Against Method" could be made on the basis of learning theory and the No Free Lunch theorem. Any rigorous method constitutes a learning algorithm, and each individual learning algorithm possesses an irregular performance profile across the space of all available fitness functions. Therefore any given scientific method will find itself unable to ascertain truths located in regions of state space that it cannot efficiently traverse.