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Arbitrariness, either a witting or an unwitting one, is a factor that belongs to a mentality, a state of facts that is more common than we would like to be. Maybe it is the most effective vehicle in revolving an unknown by not facing it, yet knowing it is there. Its efficacy becomes plain in looking at its endurance.
Such a mentality (along with mythical thinking) is detrimental to any scientific endeavours, and that for many reasons. One simple reason would be: how would we change or modify a reality for a better one if we do not get to it in the first place?
Thus, an entire method was erected against arbitrariness, putting in motion countless efforts that shaped much of today's world. Subsequently evidence came in its due place, thus factors as arbitrariness, myth, and fantasy became evicted more and more often from scientific works, and replaced by facts and research.
This was accomplished through observation, quantification, experimental or empirical testing of theories.
Yet arbitrariness has strong roots.
Arbitrariness addresses a way of not seeing the facts, even more than that, equates belief with getting to know, accordingly, accepted ideas or views entertained by an Establishment are well preserved, which is an invariant outcome, and this state of things should incite us to contemplate it more genuinely.
Each science has had its own dose of arbitrariness and myth, and psychoanalysis has its own one for sure - speaking about etiology, suggestion and contamination of data with false beliefs, cutting out observation from our work field and forcing into it hypotheses erected on hypotheses, confusing genuine knowledge with the authority ensued nevertheless by genuine experience, and so on and so forth… yet one aspect that brings out a must,