Which brings us to your question about why we believe/don’t believe in what others say that they “know”. The answer is silly but nonetheless so: because we want/ don’t want to.
What? You seem to be saying that whether I accept or reject a proposition is a function of what I desire to be true. Am I reading this correctly?
That is part of what I said, yes.
Well, then you are wrong. There are propositions that I accept as true, but dont like.. And propositions that I reject as true, but do like. This is trivially obvious. Which is why I asked to make sure that I was not misunderstanding you.
From the example that you give at the end, I’d say that you may have misunderstood me a little regardless.
What I meant is that when we come across something claiming to be scientific, that
harmonises with our general way of thinking (whether we “like” what’s said or not, is irrelevant) we may at best do some basic checks as to where the information was taken from - though often, we won’t even do that.
If we come across sources that we generally trust
-they needn’t necessarily be academic; many on RF like Wikipedia- we’ll probably stop there.
Even if the sources that we come across are unknown to us -especially when the claim in question fits into our general way of thinking- we’ll seldom trace statements back to original studies. Instead, if a claim appears “reasonable” to us (again; nothing to do with “liking”), we’ll choose to
trust its sources -
because we want to.
When we come across something claiming to be scientific, that
does not go well with our way of thinking, even if we may take the time to trace such a statement back slightly further than one that seems reasonable to us, we still rarely go all the way back to the studies claiming to lay behind it.
Lack of time, resources, etc. results in us judging claims (and their initial sources, if previously unknown to us) by how reasonable we believe the statements presented to us to be.
That is the “silly-but-nonetheless-so” point I attempted to get across: in our everyday, general lives, we may want to think ourselves as relying on science and scientific facts, but mainly we are relying on
trust (in others …claiming to be relying on science; in papers …being reviewed correctly; in researchers …following protocol; etc.)
Acknowledging and remembering this, keeps us grounded.
Humbly,
Hermit