There is a too-extreme version of this view that we can simply delegate all knowledge production to a small class of experts and then trust the outcome implicitly, simply based on their status. But I think that would be bad and unsustainable.
A good question is *what* are you trusting, the person or institution or the process they are following? One recipe for a productive and sustainable kind of trust is for everyone to have some foundational first-order beliefs about how the world works *and* how one ought to empirically investigate it. Then we can mostly leave it to specialists to do that work following the process, but generally understand what they are doing. And it means we need to invest in educating everyone to the point of having a foundation to build trust on - ie don't throw out enlightenment thinking entirely, but we certainly don't all need to be polymaths.
This is such a good - and important point. My sense is that what we need to do is to find ways to trust in a scaleable and healthy way, and not just trust a small class of experts, but each-other. This is hard, and requires that we understand knowledge networks better. There is the wider issue her of meta-epistemic processes, trusting, say, the scientific method or hermeneutics, and I do think that we would do well to revise down the stack occasionally for all things we trust, and believe we know. But realizing this is also giving up on strategies that aim at simply telling people to believe facts produced in ways you trust and, perhaps more humbly, approach our discourse problem as a set of questions about what the rules of chess are - what do we really agree on. Today the question of knowledge and what is true more and more resembles playing chess with secret, undisclosed and very different rules --
Sounds sensible. I remember being taught The Scientific Method in high school, but not (eg) common rebuttals to the problem of pessimistic induction or defenses of scientific realism. The risk of going too deep into teaching philosophy of science or knowledge early on is that you end up causing people to feel *less* confident about what we should count as knowledge and give them an escape hatch to object when it's convenient for other reasons, not when it's actually justified based on the evidence. But it also seems like doing that work could also build more confidence in the process - ie these are 'known' problems that we do account for. Anyway, great post!
There is a too-extreme version of this view that we can simply delegate all knowledge production to a small class of experts and then trust the outcome implicitly, simply based on their status. But I think that would be bad and unsustainable.
A good question is *what* are you trusting, the person or institution or the process they are following? One recipe for a productive and sustainable kind of trust is for everyone to have some foundational first-order beliefs about how the world works *and* how one ought to empirically investigate it. Then we can mostly leave it to specialists to do that work following the process, but generally understand what they are doing. And it means we need to invest in educating everyone to the point of having a foundation to build trust on - ie don't throw out enlightenment thinking entirely, but we certainly don't all need to be polymaths.
This is such a good - and important point. My sense is that what we need to do is to find ways to trust in a scaleable and healthy way, and not just trust a small class of experts, but each-other. This is hard, and requires that we understand knowledge networks better. There is the wider issue her of meta-epistemic processes, trusting, say, the scientific method or hermeneutics, and I do think that we would do well to revise down the stack occasionally for all things we trust, and believe we know. But realizing this is also giving up on strategies that aim at simply telling people to believe facts produced in ways you trust and, perhaps more humbly, approach our discourse problem as a set of questions about what the rules of chess are - what do we really agree on. Today the question of knowledge and what is true more and more resembles playing chess with secret, undisclosed and very different rules --
Sounds sensible. I remember being taught The Scientific Method in high school, but not (eg) common rebuttals to the problem of pessimistic induction or defenses of scientific realism. The risk of going too deep into teaching philosophy of science or knowledge early on is that you end up causing people to feel *less* confident about what we should count as knowledge and give them an escape hatch to object when it's convenient for other reasons, not when it's actually justified based on the evidence. But it also seems like doing that work could also build more confidence in the process - ie these are 'known' problems that we do account for. Anyway, great post!