chapter 4.6
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Ethical responsibility:
A wise person is aware of the relation between knowledge and values.
The search for knowledge is not just an individual task and includes many people, values are therefore built into it from the beginning.
Any statement that you are willing to believe as being true, requires you to believe a great many people.
You have to trust the evidence and justification presented by other people.
If you has never trusted other people you would have never learned language and would be unable to express your doubt.
Trust and faith in expert knowledge is the glue that holds everything together.
Since knowledge is based on trust we each need to exercise responsibility in our knowledge claims.
We need to be responsible and do certain things before we say that we know something:
Look at the evidence
Be consistent
Be open to criticism
Facts depend on your values.
We must be responsible in using knowledge
You can be clever if you know many things but you can only be wise if you have also thought about the use to which knowledge should be put.
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Intellectual Humility:
We can never achieve absolute knowledge.
We interpret the world through our senses, our reason and our concepts - these can never give us a full picture.
Every answer we get, leads to more questions being asked.
It is unlikely we will ever know all there is to know.
The universal tendency of human beings is to make meaning of their lives.
Very difficult but very important for us to know that there is a lot that we do not know.
Dunning - Kruger effect - where we find it difficult to know the limit of our expertise. Non experts with little knowledge on a subject are more likely to overestimate their expertise and competence in that area.
You should have a realistic grasp of your own strengths and weaknesses and try to be aware of what we do not know.