The Illusion of Rigour

We are drawn to the idea that life rests upon solid ground. Science offers us proofs and formulas. Law offers us procedures and judgments. Society offers us rules, rituals, and institutions. Together, they seem to promise security — as though truth could be guaranteed by the neatness of systems, as though diligence alone could deliver certainty.

Yet if we pause, we find the ground is not stone at all. It is scaffolding. It is a structure built quickly, provisionally, and always upon assumptions. Rigour, in its most familiar sense, is less about truth itself than about the appearance of truth: the comforting image that our ways of knowing and judging are stronger than they really are.

Social Apriories: The Hidden Scaffolding

Every collective practice begins with an unspoken starting point — an apriori. These are the assumptions we agree to carry before evidence is even gathered, the scaffolding that allows us to construct our models of the world. They are not wrong in themselves. Indeed, without them, neither science nor law nor daily life could proceed at all. But they remain assumptions nonetheless, and it is their invisibility that gives rise to the illusion of rigour.

Take the sciences. For much of modern physics, electrons were described as though they were planets, orbiting the nucleus of an atom by way of tiny circular paths. It was a metaphor borrowed from Newtonian mechanics, a prejudice smuggled in under the guise of precision. Equations were made to fit this imagery, and for a time the system appeared rigorous. Only later, with the arrival of quantum mechanics, did the scaffolding reveal itself as faulty. Electrons are not billiard balls circling a sun; they exist in clouds of probability, their behaviour entangled across space in ways the old picture could not imagine. What seemed like solid ground was only a stage-set.

The same pattern appears in the courtroom. If a camera records a driver at one point on the road, and another camera records the same driver further along after a set interval of time, the law does not — and perhaps cannot — suspend itself in radical doubt. It presumes continuity: that the same driver made the journey, in the same car, along the same road. From this scaffolding it declares guilt or innocence, fine or acquittal. This may often be correct. But the correctness is not the point. The point is that the entire procedure rests on a prior assumption that continuity must hold. Rigour, here, is built upon what cannot be rigorously proven.

And these apriories are not confined to science or law. Consider medicine. A doctor often begins with the assumption that a symptom corresponds to a singular cause — chest pain as heart disease, fatigue as iron deficiency, tremor as neurological disorder. The system of diagnosis depends on such shortcuts. Yet patients are complex, overlapping, and sometimes unclassifiable. Rigour in medicine often means reducing this complexity to a workable model: a label, a treatment, a protocol. The assumption is necessary for practice, but it remains a convenient fiction that conceals the messiness of the body beneath the neatness of a chart.

When Rigour Becomes Illusion

The difficulty does not lie in making assumptions. We must make them, or else no inquiry and no judgment could ever begin. The difficulty lies in forgetting that we have made them. When the scaffolding of assumption disappears from view, the edifice it supports begins to look like stone. We mistake the neatness of a method for the certainty of the truth it claims to reveal.

This is how rigour turns to illusion. In science, we see it when equations preserve the form of a metaphor long after the metaphor itself has been disproven. In law, we see it when procedural rules become so naturalised that their underlying presumptions can no longer be questioned. In medicine, we see it when diagnoses are mistaken for realities, as though a name on a chart were the thing itself rather than a fragile approximation.

Illusion thrives because rigour has a peculiar aesthetic. It carries the appearance of order: numbers neatly aligned, cases processed with solemn ceremony, results presented as though inevitable. Such order reassures us. We trust the look of rigour, the discipline of its vocabulary, the gravity of its institutions. Yet what we trust may only be the choreography of certainty — a performance staged upon hidden foundations.

And when these performances go unchallenged, when the shortcuts of assumption are elevated into dogma, illusion takes root. We come to believe not only in the results but in the infallibility of the process itself. Rigour ceases to be a way of disciplining inquiry and becomes instead a mask that conceals its own fragility. What was once scaffolding is now mistaken for the very structure of truth.

The Shortcut of Pre-Judgment

Prejudice, in its original sense, means nothing more sinister than pre-judgment. It is the judgment we carry into a situation before the facts have spoken. Every system of knowledge, every institution of justice, every act of daily life depends on such shortcuts. Without them, we would be paralysed by the sheer weight of possibility.

The physicist does not begin each experiment by doubting the coherence of mathematics itself. The judge does not begin each trial by suspending belief in causality or continuity. The doctor does not greet every patient as if medicine had no categories, no precedents, no names for what afflicts us. These shortcuts allow us to move forward. They transform chaos into a navigable landscape. They give us the confidence to act.

But there is danger in forgetting their provisional nature. For once a shortcut is repeated often enough, it ceases to appear as a choice. It becomes a dogma. What was once acknowledged as assumption is now treated as certainty. We no longer see the scaffolding; we see only the apparent solidity of the walls it holds up.

And here the illusion deepens. Because pre-judgment, once solidified, claims the authority of rigour. The metaphor in science becomes lawlike. The presumption in court becomes procedure. The rule of thumb in medicine becomes protocol. The shortcut, mistaken for stone, no longer feels like a shortcut at all.

The danger is not that we rely on pre-judgment. The danger is that we elevate it beyond scrutiny, until the path it clears becomes the only path we can imagine. At that moment, rigour ceases to guide us and begins to deceive us.

Living by Useful Fictions

Yet for all their fragility, these assumptions are not mistakes to be eliminated. They are the very conditions by which we live. To act at all — to decide, to judge, to cure, to build — we must lean upon fictions we know are not entirely true but are useful enough to carry us forward.

A courtroom cannot suspend every case in infinite doubt. If the judge were to entertain every radical possibility — that the image was forged, that the car was exchanged, that causality itself had been broken — no verdict could ever be reached. Justice, even in its flawed form, requires a willingness to accept continuity as a given.

Science too advances by way of fictions. The atom was drawn as a miniature solar system not because it was accurate but because it gave inquiry a foothold. The fiction held until its cracks became unbearable, and then a new fiction was built — quantum fields, probability waves, entanglement. Even these, in time, may reveal themselves to be scaffolding awaiting replacement.

In medicine, a diagnosis is often less a discovery than a compromise. To call a cluster of symptoms by a single name is to enact a fiction — one that allows for treatment, communication, and hope. The patient is not reducible to the chart, but without the chart the patient would vanish into ungraspable complexity.

We live, then, not by certainty but by the serviceable illusion of certainty. Not by unshakable truth but by scaffolding strong enough to hold our weight. These fictions are not failures. They are the bridges by which finite, fallible beings attempt to cross the abyss of the unknown.

Seeing Through the Illusion

The task, then, is not to abolish these fictions but to recognise them for what they are. Rigour is not stone; it is scaffolding. Law, science, medicine, society — all rest on pre-judgments, useful enough to act upon, fragile enough to fail. To live wisely is not to pretend that we can stand outside of these illusions, but to see through them without collapsing into cynicism.

For illusions become dangerous only when they are mistaken for absolutes. When we forget that the courtroom presumes continuity, we mistake verdicts for truth itself. When we forget that science is built upon provisional models, we mistake equations for reality. When we forget that diagnoses are compromises, we mistake labels for the person who bears them.

To see through the illusion is not to discard the structure, but to carry it with humility. It is to remember that our most rigorous systems are still human inventions, fallible bridges stretched across uncertainty. The scaffolding holds — until it does not.

And so we are invited into a posture of discernment. Walk with awareness of the hidden assumptions beneath every claim of proof. Hold gently the difference between what is useful and what is true. Trust the scaffolding, but do not confuse it for stone.

For life does not move forward on certainty. It moves forward on faith in provisional things — in the fictions that help us act, in the illusions that hold just long enough for us to take the next step.