Look at something like psychology. If you’d deferred to the leading authorities over the past 100 years, you would have been an introspectionist, then a behaviourist, then a cognitive scientist and now you’d probably be a cognitive neuroscientist. Note that these paradigms primarily differ on what they think counts as evidence, rather than quality or quantity of evidence. They all performed experiments. They share many of the same experimental methods. They all had numerous results they could point to and a neat story about how the same method could be carried on to explain everything else.
Unfortunately, the authorities get divided up into schools of thought before even they have examined all the alternatives. Typically the mainstream school has a way of dismissing alternatives without examining them. A school can become mainstream for all sorts of reasons (it provides ideological support, it’s sexier, there’s a lack of alternatives, mere persistence, it has charismatic advocates, etc). So I think you have to be very careful who you take to be an authority on a given subject. Assessing authorities probably isn’t much easier than assessing the subject directly.
If you’d deferred to the leading authorities over the past 100 years, you would have been an introspectionist, then a behaviourist, then a cognitive scientist and now you’d probably be a cognitive neuroscientist.
I think you are right, but is it so bad? If I were living at the time of the introspectionists, was there a better alternative for me? I suspect that unless I personally worked out some other theory (unlikely), I’d have to either take that one or something equally bad. Maybe it’s slightly different around boundaries of these paradigm shifts where I could possibly adopt the new ideas before the mainstream did, but most of the time it wouldn’t happen. I am far from being confident that I’d do a better job personally then the general consensus, even if that tends to be very conservative.
If I were living at the time of the introspectionists, was there a better alternative for me? I suspect that unless I personally worked out some other theory (unlikely), I’d have to either take that one or something equally bad.
Once, for a Wittgenstein course, I read through the entirety of William James’s 1890 Principles of Psychology. It was of course absurdly outdated, but I learned a lot from it. One of the things was surprise at how much time James felt he had to spend in the book attacking theories involving souls.
So yes, you could do much worse than being an introspectionist.
I’m not sure about introspectionism, but I’m sure you could find theories that have produced bad outcomes and had mainstream acceptance, particularly in medicine. I suppose the alternative is to remain noncommittal.
That’s very useful, actually. I think I have a tendency to just accept the latest medical theory/practice as being the best guess that the most qualified people made with the current state of evidence. Which may be really suboptimal if they don’t have a lot of evidence for it, and perhaps it should be independently examined if it concerns you personally. I am not sure what degree of belief to assign such things, though, because I have no experience with them.
Do you, or anyone, have an idea of how trustworthy such things generally are, in the modern age? Are there statistics about how often mainstream approaches are later proven to be harmful (and how often merely suboptimal)?
Look at something like psychology. If you’d deferred to the leading authorities over the past 100 years, you would have been an introspectionist, then a behaviourist, then a cognitive scientist and now you’d probably be a cognitive neuroscientist. Note that these paradigms primarily differ on what they think counts as evidence, rather than quality or quantity of evidence. They all performed experiments. They share many of the same experimental methods. They all had numerous results they could point to and a neat story about how the same method could be carried on to explain everything else.
Unfortunately, the authorities get divided up into schools of thought before even they have examined all the alternatives. Typically the mainstream school has a way of dismissing alternatives without examining them. A school can become mainstream for all sorts of reasons (it provides ideological support, it’s sexier, there’s a lack of alternatives, mere persistence, it has charismatic advocates, etc). So I think you have to be very careful who you take to be an authority on a given subject. Assessing authorities probably isn’t much easier than assessing the subject directly.
I think you are right, but is it so bad? If I were living at the time of the introspectionists, was there a better alternative for me? I suspect that unless I personally worked out some other theory (unlikely), I’d have to either take that one or something equally bad. Maybe it’s slightly different around boundaries of these paradigm shifts where I could possibly adopt the new ideas before the mainstream did, but most of the time it wouldn’t happen. I am far from being confident that I’d do a better job personally then the general consensus, even if that tends to be very conservative.
Once, for a Wittgenstein course, I read through the entirety of William James’s 1890 Principles of Psychology. It was of course absurdly outdated, but I learned a lot from it. One of the things was surprise at how much time James felt he had to spend in the book attacking theories involving souls.
So yes, you could do much worse than being an introspectionist.
I’m not sure about introspectionism, but I’m sure you could find theories that have produced bad outcomes and had mainstream acceptance, particularly in medicine. I suppose the alternative is to remain noncommittal.
That’s very useful, actually. I think I have a tendency to just accept the latest medical theory/practice as being the best guess that the most qualified people made with the current state of evidence. Which may be really suboptimal if they don’t have a lot of evidence for it, and perhaps it should be independently examined if it concerns you personally. I am not sure what degree of belief to assign such things, though, because I have no experience with them.
Do you, or anyone, have an idea of how trustworthy such things generally are, in the modern age? Are there statistics about how often mainstream approaches are later proven to be harmful (and how often merely suboptimal)?