Koen, You are right, to question one’s beliefs is a noble behavior, one which scientists should engage in more than anyone. As you point out, sometimes they do not. Instead they reify their beliefs to the status of “reality” no different than religion they criticize or worse, as Chomsky said they legimitate beliefs of establishment in whose employ they are.

But there is a twist. Beliefs are not simply “heuristics to navigate the world”, rather they construct the world in which we live. There is no such thing as direct access to facts and the truth, rather we construct our world through our embodied actions one step at a time. This is the often misunderstood meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s action/perception arc.