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Rigour or rigor (see spelling differences) has a number of meanings in relation to intellectual life and discourse. These are separate from judicial and political applications with their suggestion of laws enforced to the letter, or political absolutism. A religion, too, may be worn lightly, or applied with rigour. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... It has been suggested that French Wiktionary be merged into this article or section. ... American and British English spelling differences are one aspect of American and British English differences. ... Absolutism is a political theory which argues that one person, who is often generally a monarch, should hold all power. ...

Intellectual rigour

An attempted short definition of intellectual rigour might be that no suspicion of double standard be allowed: uniform principles should be applied. This is a test of consistency, over cases, and to individuals or institutions (including the speaker, the speaker's country and so on). Consistency can be at odds here with a forgiving attitude, adaptability, and the need to take precedent with a pinch of salt. A double standard, according to the World Book Dictionary, is a standard applied more leniently to one group than to another. ... Consistency has several technical meanings: In NASCAR Racing, consistency is a term coined by NASCAR drivers about the frequency of finishing well in the top ten or top five each race as it helps to get enough points to make the Chase For The Cup and win the Nextel Cup... In law, a precedent or authority is a legal case establishing a principle or rule that a court may need to adopt when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. ...

"The rigour of the game" is a quotation from Charles Lamb^[1] about whist. It implies that the demands of thinking accurately and to the point over a card game can serve also as entertainment or leisure. Intellectual rigour can therefore be sometimes seen as the exercise of a skill. It can also degenerate into pedantry, which is intellectual rigour applied to no particular end, except perhaps self-importance. Scholarship can be defined as intellectual rigour applied to the quality control of information, which implies an appropriate standard of accuracy, and scepticism applied to accepting anything on trust. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) Charles Lamb (10 February 1775 –- 27 December 1834) was an English essayist, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the childrens book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847). ... Whist (a trick-taking game) is a classic card game which was played widely in the 18th and 19th centuries and was a development of an older game Ruff and Honours. ... // For the game on The Price Is Right, please see Card Game (pricing game). ... A pedant, or pædant, is a formalist or precisionist in teaching or scholarship. ... Scholarly method - or as it is more commonly called, scholarship - is the body of principles and practices used by scholars to make their claims about the world as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public. ... In engineering and manufacturing, quality control and quality engineering are involved in developing systems to ensure products or services are designed and produced to meet or exceed customer requirements. ... Skepticism (Commonwealth spelling: Scepticism) can mean: Philosophical skepticism - a philosophical position in which people choose to critically examine whether the knowledge and perceptions that they have are actually true, and whether or not one can ever be said to have absolutely true knowledge; or Scientific skepticism - a scientific, or practical...

In relation to intellectual honesty

Intellectual rigour is an important part, though not the whole, of intellectual honesty — which means keeping one's convictions in proportion to one's valid evidence.^[2] For the latter, one should be questioning one's own assumptions, not merely applying them relentlessly if precisely. It is possible to doubt whether complete intellectual honesty exists — on the grounds that no one can entirely master his or her own presuppositions — without doubting that certain kinds of intellectual rigour are potentially available. The distinction certainly matters greatly in debate, if one wishes to say that an argument is flawed in its premises. In logic, the form of an argument is valid precisely if it cannot lead from true premises to a false conclusion. ... For other senses of this word, see evidence (disambiguation). ... Debate (North American English) or debating (British English) is a formal method of interactive and position representational argument. ... The word premise came from Latin praemisus meaning placed in front. See Premise (film) for an article discussing the use of the word in the film industry A premise (sometimes spelled premiss in philosophy) is a statement, usually put forth as part of a logical argument, that will be presumed...

Politics and the Law

The setting for intellectual rigour does tend to assume a principled position from which to advance or argue. An opportunistic tendency to use any argument at hand is not very rigorous, although very common in politics, for example. Arguing one way one day, and another later, can be defended by casuistry, i.e. by saying the cases are different. In the legal context, for practical purposes, the facts of cases do always differ. Case law can therefore be at odds with a principled approach; and intellectual rigour can seem to be defeated. This defines a judge's problem with uncodified law. Codified law poses a different problem, of interpretation and adaptation of definite principles without losing the point; here applying the letter of the law, with all due rigour, may on occasion seem to undermine the principled approach. Politics is the process by which groups make decisions. ... Casuistry (argument by cases) is an attempt to determine the correct response to a moral problem, often a moral dilemma, by drawing conclusions based on parallels with agreed responses to pure cases, also called paradigms. ... Case law (precedential law) is the body of judge-made law and legal decisions that interprets prior case law, statutes and other legal authority -- including doctrinal writings by legal scholars such as the Corpus Juris Secundum, Halsburys Laws of England or the doctinal writings found in the Recueil Dalloz... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

Mathematical rigour

In relation to mathematical proof