2009-10-25, 01:16 AM
Stereo Wrote:If everybody had to test every fact themself, it would be a massive waste of time. By establishing a scientific process and scientific credentials, we can at least decrease the chance that a fact is erroneous, and hopefully increase the chance of refining the facts until we have a close approximation of the truth. Will we ever have perfect understanding? Perhaps not. But what we have is quite decent, considering the tools we are working with.
I think the idea that other people's use of the scientific process is not as good as testing the thing yourself misses the point. Ok, so I wanna test so-and-so. It's a scientific matter. Will I, a humanities worker, be as equipped to prove this as Abbott Laboratories or the University of Chicago department of chemistry? The idea is ludicrous in my opinion.
I think if there's been testing and re-testing by people with the proper credentials, and the item's association with the rest of the world backs the conclusions of these teams, we can rest assured that things are as they have been said to be.
We do not live in the Renaissance, where a good education meant that a person could know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING, from art to politics to history to physics. There is so much knowledge out there and so many fields of knowledge that we HAVE to rely on other people -- lots of other people -- or that knowledge can never be used properly.