Kenneth Clarke once remarked that "People in the Middle Ages were as
passionately interested in truth as we are, but their sense of evidence was
very different".
Marshall McLuhan said "I can't see it until I believe it"
Neil Postman once remarked that "People today have to accept twice as much on
faith: *both* religion and science!"
In a letter to Kepler of August 1610, Galileo complained that some of the
philosophers who opposed his discoveries had refused even to look through a
telescope:
My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the
common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this
academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look
at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and
deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the
asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of
truth."
Many of the commenters on this list have missed that "evidence" and "data"
requires a fruitful context -- even to consider them! -- and that better tools
and data will only tend to help those who are already set up epistemologically
to use them wisely. (And don't forget the scientists I mentioned who have been
shown to be deeply influenced by the context of their own employers.)
The fault is not in our stars ...
Cheers,
Alan
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