Ian said:
They only added the qualifier "conventional" after you've discovered it's not
the "actual" scientific knowledge - with hindsight.
Arlo replied:
... I wonder if a more accurate comparison would be to two of Peirce's methods
for fixing belief. That is, "conventional" in some way refers to belief
established through "authority" and "actual" points to empirical methodology?
In this sense, what begins as "empirical" among the people actually involved in
the examinations radiates out as "conventional" to people not so involved but
who (pragmatically) accept the conclusions of the empirical investigators as
"truth". ..., and the empirical crowd is always the first to
alter/update/revise, which creates a "gap" between those involved and those
(again, pragmatically) accepting the authority of those involved. In this
case, it's not that "conventional" is always, ipso facto, "wrong", its just at
times we see this lag.
dmb says:
I agree with Arlo. Imagine how inconvenient life would be if each of us had to
personally witness every empirical investigation in order to reach any
conclusions about what's true and what isn't. That would be ridiculously
time-consuming and otherwise impractical. For example, I've never been to the
Forbidden City, never personally investigated the place but then again I don't
have any plausible reason to doubt its existence. As James put it, actual
empirical investigations are the source of truths that have real cash value,
that actually pay off in the concrete particulars of experience but the vast
majority of what we "know" is purchased on credit. That's really what he was up
to with the whole "cash value" thing. He was distinguishing actual empirical
knowledge (cash) from second-hand conceptual knowledge (credit). If I ever
actually visit the Forbidden City, then the belief held on credit, on trust,
will have real cash value. In that sense, conventional knowledge isn't at
all obsolete. Quite the opposite.
We CAN take most conventional beliefs on credit precisely because those are the
beliefs that work unproblematically for most people, most of the time. It's not
that they are true in any absolute sense and every belief is open to revision
but conventional beliefs are the one's that have worked well enough to have
latched and survived into the present. Every working word and concept is the
invention of some remote ancestor and it's still here because it has value as a
convention. They are the ghosts, the analogies that have won, so to speak, the
conceptual version of the game called survival of the fittest. In this sense,
"wrong" would mean something like "extinct". It would mean the bank won't cash
that check anymore.
I suppose we'd be quite amazed to learn what transformations have occurred in
this evolutionary process. Birds are evolved dinosaurs and it's not too hard to
imagine that there is a conceptual equivalent of that.
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