Authority and Experience

For us, to whom the privileged status of eyewitnesses seems obvious, this great revolution [in epistemology, privileging experience over authority] has ceased to be visible, and it is almost impossible to conceive of ourselves living in a world—a world that was never real, but always imaginary—in which garlic disempowers lodestones and goat’s blood softens diamonds” (David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution [Harper Collins 2015], 283).

However: quarks. (To quote Wallace Stevens again: “pages of illustrations.”)

However: quarks supposedly are based on a chain of inference & testimony that begins in—is founded on—direct experience, replicable and falsifiable, consistent with other observations and experiences, and so on.

Some Speculations

I. Aliens on Earth

A few months back I was pleased to see a description in print of an idea that’s been kicking around in my brain for a while now: if the earth is so old, why couldn’t there have been other intelligent species before us who have simply gone extinct, vanished without a trace, their fossils erased by the epochal movement of the continents? I mentioned this to a friend over beer and he raised the objection that some trace of these creatures would surely have remained for us to find; look at the extent to which we’ve transformed our environment in ways that won’t disappear for an extremely long time.