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AndyDaBear t1_isv02f5 wrote

Reply to comment by Ok_Meat_8322 in Science Denialism Is a Form of Pseudoscience - Massimo Pigliucci by CartesianClosedCat

>In other words, if you're presented with a body of evidence sufficient to establish a given scientific proposal to an acceptable degree of probability or certainty, do you then have an epistemic obligation or duty to endorse/accept that proposal...

You are mixing things that are right with things that are not quite right.

Not everyone has a moral obligation to look at all bodies of evidence for all scientific theories. Each of us has a limited amount of time and expertise. The obligation to follow the evidence in a given area of scientific inquiry for practical reasons must fall to a limited number of professionals whom we are asked to trust to examine, explore, and to simplify the evidence for us.

It is the obligation of those professionals to follow the evidence though, even if it means being banned by those who put pressure on them to support a narrative.

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Ok_Meat_8322 t1_isv15ft wrote

>Not everyone has a moral obligation to look at all bodies of evidence for all scientific theories.

Sure, but that's not what I'm suggesting. The question is whether one has an epistemic or intellectual obligation to accept a given scientific proposal (or any proposition, in general) provided there is sufficient evidence supporting that proposal and one is aware of the evidence. The hypothetical obviously doesn't apply to situations where one isn't aware of the relevant evidence.

So again, the question is whether there is such a thing as an epistemic duty or obligation: are we under any normative obligation to accept a proposition (or scientific proposal) when we are in possession of sufficient evidence for that proposition? Or does anything go, as far as the morality or normativity of belief is concerned?

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AndyDaBear t1_isvel6a wrote

I am sorry, but to me it comes across like you are pushing a false dichotomy.

Specifically it seems you insist I either:

  1. nod along and say "yes" to your own language about what this moral obligation is including elastic concepts like "normative obligation" which I suspect you will eventually let me know the meaning of after I pre-agree to it.
  2. Reject that there is any moral obligation of honesty in science, other than of course the one that you wish to keep control of defining.
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iiioiia t1_iszdamv wrote

Such things don't exist in base nature, they only exist within human culture.

Also, there's more involved than just evidence, there is also the element of trust. If I believe myself to have reason to not trust a person or an organization, it will modify how I consider "the" evidence - the point of the quotation marks being that what is often referred to as "the" evidence is usually only a subset of all evidence, and typically seems to not take into consideration that what evidence exists is a function of what evidence was looked for, or discarded.

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