The whole apparatus of science is about reducing the opportunities for being systematically wrong in ways you didn’t test. Sure, it doesn’t always work, but if there’s a better way I don’t think the human race has found it yet.
If knowledge is much harder to come by in domain A than in domain B, you can either accept that you don’t get to claim to know things as often in domain A, or else relax what you mean by “knowledge” when working in domain A. The latter feels better, because knowing things is nice, but I think the former is usually a better strategy. Otherwise there’s too much temptation to start treating things you “know” only in the sense of (say) most people in the field having strong shared intuitions about them in the same way as you treat things you “know” in the sense of having solid experimental evidence despite repeated attempts at refutation.
The whole apparatus of science is about reducing the opportunities for being systematically wrong in ways you didn’t test. Sure, it doesn’t always work, but if there’s a better way I don’t think the human race has found it yet.
If knowledge is much harder to come by in domain A than in domain B, you can either accept that you don’t get to claim to know things as often in domain A, or else relax what you mean by “knowledge” when working in domain A. The latter feels better, because knowing things is nice, but I think the former is usually a better strategy. Otherwise there’s too much temptation to start treating things you “know” only in the sense of (say) most people in the field having strong shared intuitions about them in the same way as you treat things you “know” in the sense of having solid experimental evidence despite repeated attempts at refutation.