Intellectual Authority and Its Discontents
just that we, personally, can’t know everything. It’s also that we now have so many experts with competing views that we can’t even find the right experts. We must pick which expert to trust from a field of hundreds, even thousands. Many of them disagree entirely.
Michael Easter • Scarcity Brain
Thus ‘how do we know…?’ is transformed into ‘by what authority do we claim…?’ The latter question is a chimera that may well have wasted more philosophers’ time and effort than any other idea. It converts the quest for truth into a quest for certainty (a feeling) or for endorsement (a social status). This misconception is called justificationism.