joanna bujes wrote:
>
> At 07:08 PM 07/03/2002 -0400, Carrol wrote:
> >Thought _begins_ with accepting the authority of others, then
> >proceeding further within the framework established by acceptance of
> >that authority.
> >
> >My position is that anyone who denies this is either (a) lying or (b)
> >doesn't really know very much.
>
> Huh? Pinch me, Carrol I can't believe this is you writing.
>
> What about "critical thought"? And, as for consciousness, what authority
> does one go to for that?
>
The critical thought which undermined Newtonian physics was grounded in an acceptance of Newtonian physics. A physicist who in (say) 1890 started out by doubting everything (thinking for himself) would not at this time be even a footnote in a history of physics.
I was in part thinking about a thread on this list a year or two ago (at the time when the Kansas Board of Education was mandating instruction in "creation science"). Some one argued that teaching just evolution in the high schools was "dogmatic" and "authoritarian." Instead they should teach the "scientific method" and let students judge for themselves. But of course there is endless debate as to what the "scientific method" is (if there even is any one method), while the facts of evolution need to be taken as established in history. One can't even intelligently debate the theory of evolution until the basic facts are taken for granted.
I believe the old saw here is that one had best take the lethality of cyanide on authority.
There was an excerpt in an old freshman comp anthology I used 40 years ago (which I've lost) by a well-known biologist who took off from an article which he had submitted to a biological journal which was refused because it just didn't fit in with "received" knowledge. A decade or so later his results turned out to be correct. His argument was that the journal was absolutely correct in refusing his article -- that its publication at the time would have blocked rather than aided further research.
> And, as for consciousness, what authority
> does one go to for that?
Consciousness, I think, tends to emerge from practice more than detached thought. It would have been an utter waste of time for me to have sat down in 1966 to read extensively in marxist works. I was quite correct _at that time_ to accept that version of left red-baiting which sees "capitalism" and "socialism" as equally exploded 19th-century ideologies. The works of Marx, Mao, Lenin took on meaning for me as I found myself involved in practice for which I simply lacked any theoretical context. Up to that point Hannah Arendt & a "left" extrapolation from Pound had done just fine.
It gets complicated here (if it isn't already), but we just can't think and act in a vacuum. Crudely, one might say that one breaks authority by first of all grasping it firmly.
Carrol