[MD] Conventional wisdom?

[david buchanan]

Ian said:
They only added the qualifier "conventional" after you've discovered it's not the "actual" scientific knowledge - with hindsight.



Arlo replied:
... I wonder if a more accurate comparison would be to two of Peirce's methods for fixing belief. That is, "conventional" in some way refers to belief established through "authority" and "actual" points to empirical methodology?  In this sense, what begins as "empirical" among the people actually involved in the examinations radiates out as "conventional" to people not so involved but who (pragmatically) accept the conclusions of the empirical investigators as "truth". ..., and the empirical crowd is always the first to alter/update/revise, which creates a "gap" between those involved and those (again, pragmatically) accepting the authority of those involved.  In this case, it's not that "conventional" is always, ipso facto, "wrong", its just at times we see this lag.


dmb says:

I agree with Arlo. Imagine how inconvenient life would be if each of us had to personally witness every empirical investigation in order to reach any conclusions about what's true and what isn't. That would be ridiculously time-consuming and otherwise impractical. For example, I've never been to the Forbidden City, never personally investigated the place but then again I don't have any plausible reason to doubt its existence. As James put it, actual empirical investigations are the source of truths that have real cash value, that actually pay off in the concrete particulars of experience but the vast majority of what we "know" is purchased on credit. That's really what he was up to with the whole "cash value" thing. He was distinguishing actual empirical knowledge (cash) from second-hand conceptual knowledge (credit). If I ever actually visit the Forbidden City, then the belief held on credit, on trust, will have real cash value. In that sense, conventional knowledge isn't at all obsolete. Quite the opposite.

We CAN take most conventional beliefs on credit precisely because those are the beliefs that work unproblematically for most people, most of the time. It's not that they are true in any absolute sense and every belief is open to revision but conventional beliefs are the one's that have worked well enough to have latched and survived into the present. Every working word and concept is the invention of some remote ancestor and it's still here because it has value as a convention. They are the ghosts, the analogies that have won, so to speak, the conceptual version of the game called survival of the fittest. In this sense, "wrong" would mean something like "extinct". It would mean the bank won't cash that check anymore. 

I suppose we'd be quite amazed to learn what transformations have occurred in this evolutionary process. Birds are evolved dinosaurs and it's not too hard to imagine that there is a conceptual equivalent of that.