>dominant metanarrative in the Western world

>regime approved thinking

> institutionally-supported metanarrative

If it is supposedly dominant or given to you by the authority, it does not necessarily make it more or less amenable to scrutiny because the basis for scepticism is always the question >What are your arguments, and what is your evidence for why I should believe in x, y, or z?

Massimo Pigliucci, being a scientist himself, before dismissing e.g. the denial of climage change, implicitly walks through the next step, a behaviour which constitutes the hallmark of an actual sceptic, namely proportioning one's belief to the evidence (David Hume).

In fact, he echoes Cicero—the person who introduced the term "probability" in Latin in the first place by making a calque out of the corresponding Greek term—by stating that

>Knowledge is assumed to be tentative and probabilistic.

Then he whips out the following Bayesian probability formula:

>P(claim) ~ P(evidence|claim) * P(claim, a priori)

which means: the probability of a given claim is proportional to the product of the probability of seeing the evidence as we observe it given the claim times the probability of the claim working a priori, i.e. according to the sum of all the branches of knowledge (theory).

What, instead, I find troublesome in Pigliucci's presentation is that he dismisses e.g. the quest for access to original papers pertaining to a given scientific discipline—specifically medicine in his example—as a kind of unjustified epistemic trespass or arrogance after quoting a dialogue by Plato's Socrates (which I generalized):

>...can anyone pursue the inquiry into [the sphere of a given branch of knowledge or into a fair test of a given expert of it] unless he has knowledge of [said sphere]?

>No one at all, it would seem, except the [expert] can have this knowledge—and therefore not the wise man. He would have to be [an expert] as well as a wise man.

It is, in my view, troublesome because, if one limits his or her inquiry into personal acquisition of knowledge by means of peer-reviewed scientific publications published on respected scientific journals, then these personal knowledge acquisition attempts do not necessarily constitute an instance of epistemic trespass or arrogance notwithstanding the complexity of the material under scrutiny. On the contrary, such attempts, as I see it, follow the spirit of scepticism and, in any case, should be judged against the possible weakness of arguments from authority which, as scientist Carl Sagan puts it,

>carry little weight

because

>authorities have made mistakes in the past

and

>will do so again in the future.

Indeed,

>Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

In effect, by want of a clearer argument, Pigliucci formulates an unsceptical argument from authority if he outright dismisses as unjustified non-experts' quest for access to original papers published on respected scientific journals.