Some people think that any appeal to authority is fallacious and/or unscientific. But that attitude itself is unscientific. The scientific method isn't just about forming hypotheses and testing them. It's also about comparing notes and advancing the state of knowledge through collaboration and communication. That means when people begin a career in science, they don't have to rediscover every scientific finding in their field up to that point. Rather, they build on what went before them.
Nobody can possibly read through all the scientific literature and evaluate all the evidence for themselves. This is especially true if you have regular job that isn't in the sciences. If we had to read all this literature and evaluate all the evidence before we could be justified in having a point of view on a scientific subject, then most of us wouldn't even be justified in believing in evolution, the Big Bang theory, or the standard model of quantum mechanics. We couldn't even be justified in believing that light travels at a constant velocity in all frames of reference, or that it's an electro-magnetic wave. A lot of us would have no justification for believing the earth orbits the sun or that there are other planets orbiting the sun.
Most of us believe these things because we learned them in school. We read them in a book, or a teacher told us. So we believe them on authority.
Even if we did have the time to delve into the peer reviewed scientific literature to discover what the evidence is and how scientists drew their conclusions from the evidence, we would still be basing our beliefs on authority. Since it was not we ourselves who looked through the telescopes/microscopes or performed the experiments or did the calculations, we are relying on the authority of the authors of those papers for that information.
There have been times when scientists have falsified information. So when we look at studies and scientific papers, we don't have direct access to the evidence. What we have is the scientists word on the evidence. So we have to trust in the reliability, honesty, and authority of the scientist even if we base our beliefs on what they say the evidence indicates.
Unless we ourselves make the measurements and observations and perform the experiments, etc., we are basing our scientific beliefs on authorities. This is even true of scientists themselves. Scientists share information, and they rely on that information. So they appeal to each other as authoritative sources on scientific information.
Scientists can be wrong, but when there's a strong consensus on a subject among experts in their field, then that is good reason for a laymen without the same scientific training who doesn't have access to the scientific equipment and samples to affirm those things, too. In fact, most of what most of us know about science is based on authority.
1 comment:
I think the concept of the distribution of doxastic responsibility is particularly relevant at the time of writing, given the pandemic.
Although it is good that you have drawn attention to this, I wonder whether you are slightly conflating two different kinds of evidence, argument from authority and evidence of testimony?
So the difference between being responsible epistemic agent, doing due diligence and checking the scientific consensus and accepting an argument on face value purely because it is made by an authority figure is an important one. The important thing about science is that, flawed as it is, it is one of the few forms of human enquiry which at least has some error-correction mechanisms built into its social practice.
If I want to, I can check the protocols used by scientists and in principle I can attempt to replicate the findings. Of course I can't practically do this in most cases, but if I accept the findings on the basis of peer review, I would argue that this is closer to accepting testimony rather than authority. I would make the same argument for the case where the editor of a journal trusts that the scientist is being honest when they report their findings.
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