Organised Skepticism

This refers to #4 of  Robert K Merton and the Mertonian Norms. I am focusing here only on organised skepticism, which Jerry Z Muller brought up in an Unsupervised Learning podcast.  It is the idea that the academic disciplines, both science and humanities, rely not only on skepticism to move forward, but a whole structure of it.  One learns to think in terms of what the critics might say and begin to defend against it.  A thesis is defended against some who will be unsympathetic. Publishing will be reviewed by your opponents. In this way, one is supposed to do a lot of the intellectual discussing in one's own head before putting it out to the world as a further understanding of the truth. Muller believes this is being lost and in some fields has already vanished.