You said: “So it seems there’s an asymmetry between argument and authority. If we know authority we are still interested in hearing the arguments; but if we know the arguments fully, we have very little left to learn from authority.”
I like your conclusion, but I can’t find anything in your argument to support it! By rearranging some words in your text I could construct an equally plausible (to a hypothetical neutral observer) argument that authority screens off evidence. You seem to believe that evidence screens off authority simply because you think evidence is what makes authority believe something. But isn’t that assuming the very thing you want to demonstrate?
Your scenarios in the first paragraphs are neither arguments nor demonstrations. They are statements of what you believe. Fair enough. But then I was expecting that you’d provide some reason for me to reject the hypothesis—a hypothesis that carried a lot of weight during the era of Scholasticism—that there is no such thing as evidence without authority (in other words, it is authority that consecrates evidence as evidence).
I used to wonder how anyone could take the obviously wrong physics of Aristotle seriously, until I learned enough about history that it dawned on me that for the Scholastic thinkers of the middle ages, how physics really worked was far less important than maintaining social order. If maintaining social order is the problem that trumps all others in your life and in your society, then evidence must necessarily carry little weight compared to authority. You will give up a lot of science, of course, but you will give it up gladly.
Obviously, we aren’t in that situation. But I worry when I see, for instance, rational arguments for the existence of God that assume the very thing they purport to prove. And your argument (hopefully I’ve misunderstood it) seems a lot like those.
Much of what is obviously wrong about Aristotle or likely to be wrong was discussed. Orseme for example wrote in the 1300s and discussed a lot of problems with Aristotle (or at least his logic). He proposed concepts of momentum and gravity that were more or less correct but lacked any quantization. And people from a much earlier time understood that Aristotle’s explanation of movement of thrown objects was deeply wrong. Attempts to repair this occurred well before the Scholastics even were around. Scholastics were more than willing to discuss alternate theories, especially theories of impetus. People seem to fail to realize how much discussion there was in the middle ages about these issues. It didn’t go Aristotle and then Galileo and Newton. Between Aristotle and Galileo were Oresme, Benedetti (who proposed a law of falling objects very similar to Galileo) and many others. Also, many of the Scholastics paid very careful attention to Avicenna’s criticism and analysis of Aristotle (Edit: My impression is that they became in some ways more knee-jerk Aristotelian after Averroism became prevalent but I don’t know enough about the exact details to comment on ratios or the like).
It might be fun to dismiss everyone in the Middle Ages as religion-bound control freaks, but that’s simply not the case. The actual history is much more complicated.
If we observe experts changing their beliefs based on evidence often, but evidence changing based on the beliefs of experts never, then it seems reasonable that the chain of causality goes reality->evidence->beliefs of experts->beliefs of non-experts, with the possible shortcut reality->evidence->beliefs of non-experts, when the evidence is particularly abundant or clear.
“I used to wonder how anyone could take the obviously wrong physics of Aristotle seriously, until I learned enough about history that it dawned on me that for the Scholastic thinkers of the middle ages, how physics really worked was far less important than maintaining social order. If maintaining social order is the problem that trumps all others in your life and in your society, then evidence must necessarily carry little weight compared to authority. You will give up a lot of science, of course, but you will give it up gladly.
Obviously, we aren’t in that situation. But I worry when I see, for instance, rational arguments for the existence of God that assume the very thing they purport to prove. And your argument (hopefully I’ve misunderstood it) seems a lot like those.”
Well, reading Sam Harris’ account of speaking to prominent atheists backing a moralistic relativism “on behalf of” the world’s religions would led me to suspect that we are just as, maybe more influenced by the idea of maintaining social order. I think that the tyrrany of choice (50 kinds of ketchup anyone?) makes it seem like we’ve got more ‘apparent choices’ many of which aren’t fundamentally different from each other as far as what social cliques to participate in.
If you look closely, each of these apparently different groups has a uniform and a rallying cry, but on the whole say much the same thing, even where the ‘authority’ in each case seems quite different.
You said: “So it seems there’s an asymmetry between argument and authority. If we know authority we are still interested in hearing the arguments; but if we know the arguments fully, we have very little left to learn from authority.”
I like your conclusion, but I can’t find anything in your argument to support it! By rearranging some words in your text I could construct an equally plausible (to a hypothetical neutral observer) argument that authority screens off evidence. You seem to believe that evidence screens off authority simply because you think evidence is what makes authority believe something. But isn’t that assuming the very thing you want to demonstrate?
Your scenarios in the first paragraphs are neither arguments nor demonstrations. They are statements of what you believe. Fair enough. But then I was expecting that you’d provide some reason for me to reject the hypothesis—a hypothesis that carried a lot of weight during the era of Scholasticism—that there is no such thing as evidence without authority (in other words, it is authority that consecrates evidence as evidence).
I used to wonder how anyone could take the obviously wrong physics of Aristotle seriously, until I learned enough about history that it dawned on me that for the Scholastic thinkers of the middle ages, how physics really worked was far less important than maintaining social order. If maintaining social order is the problem that trumps all others in your life and in your society, then evidence must necessarily carry little weight compared to authority. You will give up a lot of science, of course, but you will give it up gladly.
Obviously, we aren’t in that situation. But I worry when I see, for instance, rational arguments for the existence of God that assume the very thing they purport to prove. And your argument (hopefully I’ve misunderstood it) seems a lot like those.
Much of what is obviously wrong about Aristotle or likely to be wrong was discussed. Orseme for example wrote in the 1300s and discussed a lot of problems with Aristotle (or at least his logic). He proposed concepts of momentum and gravity that were more or less correct but lacked any quantization. And people from a much earlier time understood that Aristotle’s explanation of movement of thrown objects was deeply wrong. Attempts to repair this occurred well before the Scholastics even were around. Scholastics were more than willing to discuss alternate theories, especially theories of impetus. People seem to fail to realize how much discussion there was in the middle ages about these issues. It didn’t go Aristotle and then Galileo and Newton. Between Aristotle and Galileo were Oresme, Benedetti (who proposed a law of falling objects very similar to Galileo) and many others. Also, many of the Scholastics paid very careful attention to Avicenna’s criticism and analysis of Aristotle (Edit: My impression is that they became in some ways more knee-jerk Aristotelian after Averroism became prevalent but I don’t know enough about the exact details to comment on ratios or the like).
It might be fun to dismiss everyone in the Middle Ages as religion-bound control freaks, but that’s simply not the case. The actual history is much more complicated.
If we observe experts changing their beliefs based on evidence often, but evidence changing based on the beliefs of experts never, then it seems reasonable that the chain of causality goes reality->evidence->beliefs of experts->beliefs of non-experts, with the possible shortcut reality->evidence->beliefs of non-experts, when the evidence is particularly abundant or clear.
“I used to wonder how anyone could take the obviously wrong physics of Aristotle seriously, until I learned enough about history that it dawned on me that for the Scholastic thinkers of the middle ages, how physics really worked was far less important than maintaining social order. If maintaining social order is the problem that trumps all others in your life and in your society, then evidence must necessarily carry little weight compared to authority. You will give up a lot of science, of course, but you will give it up gladly.
Obviously, we aren’t in that situation. But I worry when I see, for instance, rational arguments for the existence of God that assume the very thing they purport to prove. And your argument (hopefully I’ve misunderstood it) seems a lot like those.”
Well, reading Sam Harris’ account of speaking to prominent atheists backing a moralistic relativism “on behalf of” the world’s religions would led me to suspect that we are just as, maybe more influenced by the idea of maintaining social order. I think that the tyrrany of choice (50 kinds of ketchup anyone?) makes it seem like we’ve got more ‘apparent choices’ many of which aren’t fundamentally different from each other as far as what social cliques to participate in.
If you look closely, each of these apparently different groups has a uniform and a rallying cry, but on the whole say much the same thing, even where the ‘authority’ in each case seems quite different.