For the medical term see rigor (medicine) A rigor is an episode of shaking occurring during a high fever. ...

Rigour (American English: "rigor") 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. American English or U.S. English is the diverse form of the English language used mostly in the United States of America. ... Absolutism is a political theory which argues that one person (generally, a monarch) should hold all power. ... Religion, sometimes used interchangeably with faith, is commonly defined as belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the practices and institutions associated with such belief. ...

The rigour of the game is a quotation from Charles Lamb 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- 27 July 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. ... This page describes the classic game of Whist (a trick-taking game) which was played widely in the 18th and 19th centuries. ... A card game is any game using playing cards, either traditional or game-specific. ... 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 or quality engineering is a set of measures taken to ensure that defective products or services are not produced, and that the design meets performance 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...

Intellectual rigour is an important part, though not the whole, of intellectual honesty. 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 we, none of us, can entirely master our 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. Debate is a formalized system of (usually) logical argument. ...

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 to hand is not very rigorous, if 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, 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 and method of decision-making for groups of human beings. ... 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 - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ... A judge or justice is an appointed or elected official who presides over a court. ...

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 is an ethical rule applied more stringently to one party than to others. ... Consistency has three technical meanings: In mathematics and logic, as well as in theoretical physics, it refers to the proposition that a formal theory or a physical theory contains no contradictions. ... Precedent is the principle in law of using the past in order to assist in current interpretation and decision-making. ...

Mathematical rigour

See also

• Intellectual dishonesty
• Self-deception
• Sophistry
• honesty
• intellectual
• Pedantagonism