Such is the claim of those suffering from scientism. Now, I’m not the smartest shit in the bowl but isn’t everything based on eyewitness accounts? Let’s go for some infinite regress here, shall we? Let’s play with epistemology.
I’m aware that eyewitness accounts can be tenuous at best sometimes as the human mind’s pretty bloody ordinary with memory and other things. I can’t be arsed going into it; think for yourselves. How do you know that the latest studies/experiments on ANYTHING are accurate? Were you there? No, you’ve based your ideas on that of the eyewitnesses who were. Remembering that part of the scientific method is observation, how is it that suddenly scientists’ observations count for more? Oh, because they’re peer-reviewed and replicable? Peer review doesn’t count for much when certain scientific paradigms, should they be cast asunder, would have thousands of people out of jobs. They’ll accept pretty much anything that doesn’t rock the boat. Some asshole once said something like “It takes a generation for new scientific ideas to become accepted. Just have to wait for the older generation to die off,” or some shit. Yeah, seems about right. Livelihoods are based around scientific notions. People study for years and years to “become someone important” in scientific circles. To have all that knowledge rendered redundant or out of date would be the death knell for those under the apprehension that all they knew was right’s careers. It would leave them as stupid as, shit, me. Can’t have that. I’m just a nobody.
How can you KNOW anything? I don’t profess to know ANYTHING. I, like certain other zetetics, merely rank things on a scale of probabilities. I realise that trusting my own eyes is fraught with possible error as is all information from all my senses. But it’s this same information, filtered through the senses of others, that scientism’s fanboys and girls put stock in… ALL their stock. And yet, eyewitness testimony, even that of thousands of people witnessing the same phenomenon at the same time with exactly the same reports, is worth naught. In fact, without even attempting to study whatever phenomenon that might have been, scientism writes it off as mass hallucination or something equally absurd and its adherents believe it! What? I thought YOU guys were the skeptics? Hardly.
You’re skeptical only of claims that don’t run with the grain of current thought. Why are you not skeptical of the claims made by big phramaceuticals or, wait for it… the government–especially their conspiracy THEORY that 19 arab dudes with boxcutters managed to elude the most technologically advanced intelligence agencies of the world, get on planes without being on passenger manifests, take them over with boxcutters, and proceed to fly these planes through manuevers that even the most experienced pilots of the same planes admit they would have great difficult in doing; why not question how a passport survived a gigantic fireball and was discovered laying neatly on top of a bunch of rubble; why not question how a janitor in one of those buildings experienced an explosion from beneath him before any plane hit (witnessing a friend’s flesh sloughing off after being burned by the same explosion)–someone hailed a hero until he started mentioning this fact and then he was off the media’s hot-list?
Admittedly I only know this, or think I know this, from what I’ve heard, seen and been told but this is exactly the same standard by which scientism’s proponents claim they know certain scientific ideas are factual.
Admit it, you only think you know what you think you know. You can never be sure of anything in the same way that I can’t be sure that even this paragraph states a fact. Even your own eyewitness knowledge may be dubious. How do you know anything?
(I could have worded this better and didn’t really get to any infinite regress but I don’t care. Also, any contradiction you think I’ve made may not be contradictory at all so pointing that out just means you’re a monotheist–non-sequitur, you say? Suck it up, buttercup, religious fanatic, zealot).
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