I self-describe as skeptic. On the other hand, my skepticism is of fairly recent vintage. That is, while I’ve always been skeptical of very many things, a generally skeptical outlook (towards everything, not just some individual things) is something I’ve ‘converted’ to not very long back.
Here’s one stumbling block I seem to have come up against, and I was wondering if any of the more seasoned skeptics here might have thoughts about this. (And while this occurs to me only now, perhaps this has already been discussed elsewhere, in which case you could just point me to those discussion/s.)
I was, just now, reading this article about some studies that turned out to be rigged by pharmaceutical companies. The article went on to talk about how “evidence-based medicine” is sometimes, in specific instances, not really “evidence-based” at all. It was a newspaper article, which I read in today’s (physical) paper, and I’m not attempting to search the article out online and link to it here, since the article itself is only incidental. I mention it only because it set me thinking : how truly skeptical is our skepticism? Or are there limits to (individual) skepticism?
Our overall (rational) worldview comprises so many elements that we take simply on trust. Our trust in medication that research apparently pronounces beneficial is one egregious example of this. Similarly, our trust in certain dietary and lifestyle choices that research apparently validates (and which research could be vitiated by junk-food manufacturers, for example, or tobacco manufacturers, or cell phone manufacturers, just as medical research is sometimes subverted by pharmaceutical companies). But these examples are very focused, very specific. What I’m talking about now, in this post and thread, is in a more general sense, and this applies to most things that make up our worldview.
Take, for instance, the ‘fact’ that nothing can go faster than light. Even schoolchildren ‘know’ this. But you and I, ordinary individuals, how sure are we of this after all? If we wanted to make sure of this, at the individual level, then what would we do? Read up a bit. Browse through the Internet. Read some books. Talk with friends and acquaintances who happen to be physicists. Perhaps laboriously work our way through some research papers. And yet, these are only words written online, talks delivered by someone online, or words written in a book or paper. How ‘true’ are they?
If we’re really really determined, we could educate ourselves, get the necessary training in physics and mathematics to be better able to evaluate this question. Perhaps we could go even further, and get ourselves the qualifications, perhaps even the jobs, that would give us direct access to actual experiments, and we could then actually verify this for ourselves. Yes, then we could really and truly verify this!
But doing this would take up years and years of our life! And what we’d have verified would be only one single thing/idea, or at least, one single class of things/ideas. That would still leave unverified all of the other things that we think we know about the world. To take a random instance, the veracity of, say, evolution. That’s a wholly different subject altogether, a wholly different disciple. And these two (the speed of light, and evolution) were just two random examples, there are so many other things the “knowledge’ of which we simply take for granted, isn’t it?
My point is, all of our skepticism notwithstanding, it seems to me that we are still, at the individual level, reduced to taking most of the elements of what we know simply on trust.
Had we been born five, six centuries before today, perhaps a couple of millennia before today, then could our skepticism (assuming we could have somehow, magically, been equipped with an uncompromisingly skeptical outlook back then) have led us to reject the nonsense that made up the worldview of people back then? We could have read, and ‘researched’, and still gone round and round exploring the minutiae of theology and philosophy. But could we have broken out of the system, into realization that we don’t actually know anything at all? Back five hundred years ago, or a couple millennia ago, I mean?
Can we really do it now, today? At the individual level? (And after all, for true skepticism, the “individual level” is ultimately the only/truly meaningful level, right? Or am I wrong in assuming that?)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!
Here’s one stumbling block I seem to have come up against, and I was wondering if any of the more seasoned skeptics here might have thoughts about this. (And while this occurs to me only now, perhaps this has already been discussed elsewhere, in which case you could just point me to those discussion/s.)
I was, just now, reading this article about some studies that turned out to be rigged by pharmaceutical companies. The article went on to talk about how “evidence-based medicine” is sometimes, in specific instances, not really “evidence-based” at all. It was a newspaper article, which I read in today’s (physical) paper, and I’m not attempting to search the article out online and link to it here, since the article itself is only incidental. I mention it only because it set me thinking : how truly skeptical is our skepticism? Or are there limits to (individual) skepticism?
Our overall (rational) worldview comprises so many elements that we take simply on trust. Our trust in medication that research apparently pronounces beneficial is one egregious example of this. Similarly, our trust in certain dietary and lifestyle choices that research apparently validates (and which research could be vitiated by junk-food manufacturers, for example, or tobacco manufacturers, or cell phone manufacturers, just as medical research is sometimes subverted by pharmaceutical companies). But these examples are very focused, very specific. What I’m talking about now, in this post and thread, is in a more general sense, and this applies to most things that make up our worldview.
Take, for instance, the ‘fact’ that nothing can go faster than light. Even schoolchildren ‘know’ this. But you and I, ordinary individuals, how sure are we of this after all? If we wanted to make sure of this, at the individual level, then what would we do? Read up a bit. Browse through the Internet. Read some books. Talk with friends and acquaintances who happen to be physicists. Perhaps laboriously work our way through some research papers. And yet, these are only words written online, talks delivered by someone online, or words written in a book or paper. How ‘true’ are they?
If we’re really really determined, we could educate ourselves, get the necessary training in physics and mathematics to be better able to evaluate this question. Perhaps we could go even further, and get ourselves the qualifications, perhaps even the jobs, that would give us direct access to actual experiments, and we could then actually verify this for ourselves. Yes, then we could really and truly verify this!
But doing this would take up years and years of our life! And what we’d have verified would be only one single thing/idea, or at least, one single class of things/ideas. That would still leave unverified all of the other things that we think we know about the world. To take a random instance, the veracity of, say, evolution. That’s a wholly different subject altogether, a wholly different disciple. And these two (the speed of light, and evolution) were just two random examples, there are so many other things the “knowledge’ of which we simply take for granted, isn’t it?
My point is, all of our skepticism notwithstanding, it seems to me that we are still, at the individual level, reduced to taking most of the elements of what we know simply on trust.
Had we been born five, six centuries before today, perhaps a couple of millennia before today, then could our skepticism (assuming we could have somehow, magically, been equipped with an uncompromisingly skeptical outlook back then) have led us to reject the nonsense that made up the worldview of people back then? We could have read, and ‘researched’, and still gone round and round exploring the minutiae of theology and philosophy. But could we have broken out of the system, into realization that we don’t actually know anything at all? Back five hundred years ago, or a couple millennia ago, I mean?
Can we really do it now, today? At the individual level? (And after all, for true skepticism, the “individual level” is ultimately the only/truly meaningful level, right? Or am I wrong in assuming that?)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2HKmaR6
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire