I have a son who, for reasons completely beyond my ken, joined a church when he was in HS. I’ve been to some of the services, and the words that stick with me are the words: “This I know to be true.” generally spoken at the end of some sort of personal testimony. It appears to be a combination of mantra and signal of membership in the group. The trouble is that whatever the “This” in the mantra refers to is not independently verifiable by anyone who has not drunk the Kool-Aid.
However, that criticism might just as well be leveled at Kossaks. A perusal of the DKtionary reveals that there are mechanisms for shutting down folks who don’t like the taste of Berry Blue. I haven’t found any sign that drinking Berry Blue while bathing in it is similarly frowned upon.
It’s the same in the scientific community. Harebrained notions (e.g., Wegner’s ideas about moving continents, Bretz’s suggestions about the origins of the scablands, Fleischmann and Pons’ claims about anomalous heat and neutrons from an electrochemistry experiment, Darwin’s notions about mutability of species, Einstein’s notions about space and time, Copernicus’s claim that the earth orbits the sun and not the other way around, and string theory, to name just a few) are generally greeted with some skepticism by the “scientific” community until such time as they are “independently verified”, generally by someone(s) with enough mojo in the affected community, or, until the current generation of skeptics dies out to be replaced by a new generation of scientists who see the point of the harebrained notion. Even then, there are folks who are constantly nipping at the heels of scientific truth (I should point out that nipping at the heels of established scientific truth is the only real job of a scientist).
So how does a normal human being separate wheat from chaff, sheep from goats, actinides from fission products (oops, reprocessing SNF is not allowed in this country)? This question gets at the heart of what I think is the key crisis in our country (if not the world) right now — “what information do I believe is reliable and why do I believe that it is reliable?”
I want to repeat that last thought: The question is: “What information do I believe is reliable and why do I believe that it is reliable?”
— Interregnum for a week of intense action on the floor of the US Senate under the masterful direction of one Jamin B. Raskin —
Last night, my wife and I were watching the Teaching Company (a.k.a. The Treat Courses) course The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas Noble. We generally watch two lectures in a sitting, and last night, we finished with Lecture 12 From Greek Religion to Socratic Philosophy. In that lecture, Prof. Noble explained that Greek philosophical investigation of knowledge revolved around four questions (quoted from the course guidebook):
- What does it mean to know?
- Can we really know anything?
- What means are available to us for knowing?
- How is the world constituted, and how am I constituted so that I can know something about the world?
I was really surprised to note the similarity between the question asked (in draft) immediately before the interregnum and the questions the Greeks were asking 2500 years ago. Perhaps a better question is: How can it be that we humans have such divergent methods for answering fundamental questions?
As an aside — I’ve made my way through the DKtionary to the “tipjar” and now understand its function. I am horrified that for many years, I have denied mojo to authors of stories I admired and often shared with others.
