The Self-Sealing Clause
Idea
A sentence built into an argument so that doubting it counts as proof of it. In 1978 a Boston man named Ralph Paulson wrote that it suits them if ordinary people refuse to believe in collective mind power. In 1980 two US Army officers wrote that their methods had to be undetectable, and that exposing even one would wreck everything. Both have arranged things so that finding nothing is the expected result. It is the difference between a claim you can check and one you cannot: Paulson's chapter on the Kennedy killing proposes a test that could fail, and his chapter on mind power does not.
The engine's definition — word for word
A clause written into a claim that converts disbelief into evidence for it: assent confirms, doubt confirms, no null result can bear on it.
paulson_1978_psychic_warrior (1978): having conceded most psychiatrists will read him as a disturbed megalomaniac — 'eight years ago I would have agreed with them, but it is to our advantage to encourage disbelief in collective mental power, amoung the general population. Only the elites will know the true power of the collective screen.' Disbelief listed as an objective.
mindwar (1980, Aquino + Vallely): coercive methods 'must not be detectable by ordinary means', and 'the exposure of a single such method would do unacceptable damage to MindWar's reputation for truth.' Undetectability written in as a requirement, so absence of evidence is the predicted state. Same paper, purest form: MindWar 'states a whole truth that, if it does not now exist, will be forced into existence by the will of the United States' — a claim generating its own truth conditions.
Engine read: the discriminator between a testable claim and an untestable one, inside a single author. Paulson's JFK chapter proposes a ten-riflemen replication test that could fail (scorecard row 287); his collective-screen chapter is built so that nothing could.
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