[ExI] rational hypocrites

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 12:27 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 12:27 PM, William Flynn Wallace <
> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
>> Is believing in an authority rationalism?  Depends on the authority
>>
>
> It's inductive reasoning. If the authority has a history of usually
> correctly reporting the facts (New York Times, Washington Post, Science,
> Nature) then they will probably continue to do so and be correct about what
> they say today too. If the authority has a history of never being correct (
> Alex Jones, QAnon) or seldom being correct ( Breitbart, Fox News) then they
> will probably continue with that too and what they say today is most likely
> incorrect.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
> When you say the NYT has a history of being correct, then you are using
> some external sources of validity to conclude that - external to the Times,
> that is.  And ditto for the external lack of validity for Fox.
>
> So you have a team approach:  if Nature, Science, the NYT all say the same
> thing, then you conclude it's true (true in the scientific sense of
> provisionally true).  And likewise when you have contradictions, Fox and
> NYT agree, you wait to see if it can be sorted out later, I assume.  Or
> maybe, if Fox is consistently bad, then just ignore it
>
> But if no external sources of validity are used, then it's clearly plain
authoritarianism and no more, right?  Like religion.

bill w

bill w




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