The Authority of Knowledge: a Chimera.
Why we cannot rely on any authority to justify (scientific) knowledge.
Another way of looking at how we acquire knowledge, is by choosing to rely only on specific sources of knowledge. We can ascribe certainty, proof or reliability to some sources of knowledge and not to others. We then speak of the authority of knowledge. However, the question rises why one authority is more reliable or trustworthy than the other. David Deutsch aptly puts it this way: “Instead of ‘how do we know’, it is ‘by what authority do we claim..’? The latter question is a chimera that may well have wasted more philosophers time and effort than any other idea.”[1] I agree with Deutsch. There are no sources of knowledge that are truer, what counts is the method how we came to know something, not who or what claims to know this. Because you can always ask yourself, how did this authority acquire this knowledge? And why would this authority be correct and not fallible? One of the most absurd forms of authority in order to justify our knowledge is what in religion is called a revelation. The knowledge in the form of a revelation has in this case conveniently been passed down to someone from God himself, and thus it is true since God is infallible. The problem with revelations is that I can claim that every article on my Substack was a revelation from some higher entity, no one would be able to test or falsify this claim. Unfortunately the creation of these articles cost me enormous amounts of time, rewriting, criticism from others and so forth.
Authority can also be interpreted, or misused I would rather say, as expertise. For example: someone who is a professor in neuroscience from some prestigious university has more authority to write something about brains than some 12 year old. Next to expertise, one can also give authority to the medium. A post on facebook has less authority than an article in a Science journal. But we ought not to mistake the author or medium as a substitute for good explanations and scientific evidence. There is only a high correlation between the two. Authors such as the professor in the example above will have had training in finding good explanations, weighing scientific evidence and there will be high stakes in presenting the information as correctly and unbiased as possible. The medium will likewise want to minimize its number of erroneous or scientifically weak articles, and therefore have multiple independent reviews of the article before publication. This is all very convenient for us, since we are often not capable or in the mood of reviewing and assessing all the data or argumentation. Nonetheless, all human beings are fallible. We can be wrong and have been wrong many times in the past. Being wrong is not a bad thing, it is necessary if you believe in something called progress. However, a specific author or medium still does not make some theory more likely. When weighing the evidence or when falsifying a theory, we do not look at the author or medium and convert this into credence of the theory. It is all about convenience. We listen to our teacher because he or she is likely more proficient in the topic the lesson concerns than we are ourselves. It is not practical to doubt everything our teacher tells us. Still, it is not true because the teacher tells us it is, it is true because the teacher understand the arguments better and is able to explain them to us. The teacher is the medium in this case, just as much as the professor who wrote an article on neuroscience is the medium of the theory or idea proposed. A good theory, idea or explanation does not need to rely on the author or medium in which it is presented.
To conclude, we cannot rely on any authority to justify (scientific) knowledge. How then can we justify knowledge? David Deutsch explains that one answer to this question, or in his words the opposing position, is called fallibilism – namely the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying ideas as being true or probable. Meaning: we are all fallible.
Bibliography:
- David Deutsch. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (London: Pengiun Books, 2012)
[1] Deutsch, The beginning of Infinity, P9