Comparing Intellectual Autonomy and Intellectual Solidarity

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This assignment submission deals with the advantages and drawbacks of intellectual autonomy and intellectual solidarity on the basis of the arguments from David Hume, Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant as presented on the video lectures of this class. I also make the claim that many of the advantages and drawbacks discussed by Hume, Reid and Kant correspond to advantages and drawbacks experienced by any self-regulating system that is developing towards either a greater degree of specialization (intellectual solidarity) or a greater degree of diversification (intellectual autonomy). In the discussion between Hume and Reid a central question was how much weight to put on testimony. Both agreed that testimony is an extremely important tool in the pursuit of knowledge, but they strongly disagreed on it's correct application. Hume argued that in order to avoid false beliefs you shoudn't trust a testimony unless you have evidence that the testifier is likely to be right. Reid thought that distrusting testimonies was generally putting obstacles on the social pursuit of knowledgeand you should generally trust them. For Kant any use testimony to avoid having to do your own thinking was an inferior path to take to begin with. Avoiding the need to do your own thinking could certainly be seen as an advantage as well. If we assume (like Hume and Reid seem to agree) that pursuit for knowledge is a community effort then taking your peers word for truth in something allows you to focus your own thinking on something else and, assuming limited time and limited capacity, reach higher results than you could have been able to reach without such specialization. Especially Reid argues that not capitalizing on this advantage would "place us ... ... middle of paper ... ...nization of human societies, in the financial investment decisions, in agriculture, etc. so it shouldn't be surprising that it is present in the pursuit of knowledge as well. A religious or scientific authority could easily challenge my claim and say that the truth is not a matter of opinion and that knowingly allowing false beliefs to develop in your community can never serve the purpose of gaining a more reliable understanding. It would be equally easy for an anarchist to demand the full freedom for everybody to make up their own minds. The unfair response would be to appeal to the extreme cases mentioned above, but even in a more moderate tone it is possible to remind the authoritarians of all the right choices made for the wrong reasons but leading to unexpected results and remind the anarchist that intellectual solidarity does not imply intellectual coersion.

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