When to stop being skeptical

[KingMerv00]

Let's say I make a factual claim:

"This artifact is X years old. I know because I used carbon dating."

As a skeptic, you could go look at the report online and read about the methodology and accuracy of Carbon dating. You could actually watch a similar test being performed. You could go read the scientist's hand-written notebook and interview the technician that performed the test. Etc etc...

The question here is, when do you stop doing research on a particular claim?

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

When do I stop if I'm me, or when do I stop if I'm a scientist in that field?

If me, I stop when I'm fairly convinced one way or the other, or when I no longer care.

If I'm a scientist, I stop when I'm satisfied with the replications.

~~ Paul

 

[crocodile deathroll]

I am most particulary skeptical of miracles, and the day a one legged person grows his missing leg back after holy water has been sprinkled on his stump, or it miraclulously grows back after he makes a pilgrimage to Lourdes (or the like) is the day I will no no longer be so skeptical.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I'm with Paul. How important is the claim to YOU?

Someone says he saw a bus today, I probably won't question him.

He says he saw a flying saucer, I want evidence.

In the case of scientific research, we rely largely on the claimant's peers to check his data. Where the data are sparse, the peers have limited access to it and the claimants have reputations depending on their interpretation of the data, I remain permanently sceptical.

An example would be human palaeontology. Do I believe all Don Johansen's interpretations? No. Richard Leakey? No.
Do I think they are liars? No.
I just think they are extrapolating widely from minimal evidence. Which is OK, so long as we all know that's what they are doing.

I've been to Lake Turkana once. Interesting place, but I'm not going back to check the digs.

 

[aargh57]

I've been reading "Atheism: The Case Against God" by George H. Smith and it talks about the Christian arguing that atheists have "faith" by trusting in authority. Anyway, I think it's applicable in this case:


"We acquire knowledge in a variety of different ways, but all knowledge must eventually meet the requirements of reason. All appeals to authority must be subsumed within the guidelines of reason. The appeal to authority is not a different means of acquiring knowledge; it is one aspect of rational inquiry, not an ultimate ground of truth.
A rational appeal to authority is fundamentally nonauthoritarian. For example, if we accept the testimony of physicists concerning the truth of scientific theories, we do so not because of their authority (i.e., not because they say so), but because we believe that they are able to provide strong evidence to support their positions. Again quoting Blanshard:
"If we ask why they {the Physicists} do accept certain results, the answer is very simple; given the conditions, they have seen these results to be necessary; and they are ready to supply the data and the reasoning to anyone who can follow. In short, they do not take these things to be true because they are authorities; they are authorities because they can see these things to be true.... The court to which in the end we shall take our appeal is not authority, but those reasons through seeing which an authority becomes an authority, namely, those that condition or determine the truth itself.... If this higher warrant is there, authority is superseded; if it is not there, authority fails. In neither case is authority itself the final court of appeal.*"

*Blanshard, Nature of Thought, Vol II, p.217

In other words, when Phil Plait claims something about astronomy I accept his testimony because I believe he can provide strong evidence to support it. When Sylvia Brown claims something about astrology (or pretty much anything else for that matter) I dismiss it unless she can site specific evidence that I can verify. I think that I'm willing to accept what scientists say they have tested to a comfortable degree of certainty.

 

[Timothy]

Two other hallmarks of science are repeatability and peer review, both of which are somewhat intertwined in the argument to authority. If Scientist X makes a claim, especially if it's published in the peer reviewed literature, I have very high confidence that

1. The scientist could, if pressed, present the methods and techniques used and that someone else could reproduce the same results. (When it doesn't, it gets lots of press. Remember Pons and Fleischman?)
2. If there is sufficient disagreement surrounding a conclusion, members of the peer community will *loudly* voice their concerns. (Just recently, members of the ornithological community were ready to publish a paper on their doubts about the recent discovery that the ivory-billed woodpecker was not extinct. They cited the poor quality photographic evidence as dubious, and criticized the observers for not having audio evidence. When the observers produced the audio evidence, which they had been carefully combing by computer and had not finished when they made their initial announcement, the doubters were satisfied and pulled their critical paper from publication.)

When something is well accepted in the scientific community, it has undergone the scrutiny of many, many well trained people, some of which are actively seeking to discover flaws in it. That does not mean that it is necessarily true (sometimes many, many people overlook something or make a mistake) but it lends it the authority of being open to criticism by many people with many different motives, and being accepted by the vast majority.

Contrast that with fields like religious dogma, where dissent in various religions and at various points in history meant ostracism or death ... certainly prompting different motivations in the critics.

- Timothy

 

[aggle-rithm]

Let's say I make a factual claim:

"This artifact is X years old. I know because I used carbon dating."

As a skeptic, you could go look at the report online and read about the methodology and accuracy of Carbon dating. You could actually watch a similar test being performed. You could go read the scientist's hand-written notebook and interview the technician that performed the test. Etc etc...

The question here is, when do you stop doing research on a particular claim?

I would say that something generally accepted by the scientific world can be taken on faith until its veracity becomes an issue for some reason. If I were writing an article or book on a subject, or there was some other occasion where I would be expected to speak with authority on the subject, I would take the trouble to dig down and verify that what I have believed all this time is really true. Otherwise, why bother?

Precisely WHERE you would stop is a judgement call. You would stop at a point that most people would consider reasonably prudent. Anyone who expects more is probably a whacko looking for holes in your argument.

 

[The Kilted Yaksman]

I am most particulary skeptical of miracles, and the day a one legged person grows his missing leg back after holy water has been sprinkled on his stump, or it miraclulously grows back after he makes a pilgrimage to Lourdes (or the like) is the day I will no no longer be so skeptical.

I think I can agree with what you say, but I would probably take it one step further. I would no longer be so skeptical about that particular claim, but by no means would I be ready to drop my drawers, metaphorically speaking, and believe in any ludicrous claim thrown my way.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

The question here is, when do you stop doing research on a particular claim?

Depends on the particular claim, of course, there is no simple answer because the question changes. Every time.

 

[Flatworm]

The question is not when to stop being skeptical, but when to accept a claim. For me this happens when the possibility of a claim being false becomes more absurd than the possibility of it being true.

Edited for grammar.