Sublime

There is, however, another kind of duty involved: something that philosophers call epistemic duty. This is the duty to subject one’s beliefs to the appropriate amount of critical scrutiny: to examine whether they are warranted by the available evidence and to at least attempt to ascertain whether or not there exists any countervailing evidence.

Liberal science, to Rauch, is a system that applies two consistent rules: the “skeptical rule” and the “empirical rule.”17 These he summarizes as “no one gets the final say” and “no one has personal authority,”18 respectively, arguing that “these peculiar rules are two of the most successful social conventions the human species has ever evolved.”19

In his book Pale Blue Dot, my dad wrote, “Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose. It drives us to accumulate better data.”

My parents taught me that there has never been any correlation between how true something was and how fervently it was believed.

Thus, in searching for and judging explanations, we need more than just a refutation of solipsism. We need to develop reasons for accepting or rejecting the existence of entities that may appear in contending theories; in other words, we need a criterion for reality.