Supine Deference
A culture in which individual judgement is largely suspended is corrupt. But the cure for this malady is not conceptual revision. The concept of knowledge is what it is come what may, and it is indispensable.
From The Community of Knowledge, by Michael Welbourne:
Some readers may see my theory as entailing certain grave intellectual vices and undermining important values. For example, it may be denied that my knowledge that lightning is an electrical discharge is really knowledge at all if my intellect has not been exercised in gaining an understanding of the fact. At bottom this and kindred charges arise because my theory is hospitable to the notion of authority. Deference to the notion of authority, the taking of things on trust without regard for understanding, the resignation of individual judgement and so on are all things we have learned to deplore. Yet it may be charged that my theory encourages, even enjoins them.
Such accusations may be given a historical slant. We have a certain picture of the history of our culture. It hardly matters whether it is an accurate picture but it does matter that we have it. According to this picture, the values of autonomy, as I shall call them comprehensively, were won with difficulty in the seventeenth century or thereabouts, and without them the great advance in human knowledge associated with the rise of natural science could never have occurred. My theory, it may be said, far from giving us a new conceptual map, tries in effect to reinstate an old and bad one, the 'mediaeval' map which represents knowledge as something available from authorities who deserve unquestioning deference and trust. The defeat of these attitudes is the great achievement of the seventeenth century and it is a betrayal of that victory to come up now with a theory of knowledge which can only serve to re-establish them.
There is something in this charge, but not a lot. . . .
The fact that habits of supine deference may have been commonplace has no tendency to show that the conception of knowledge which sanctions the idea of its authoritative transmission and provides the soil in which these habits are able to flourish is itself wrong . . . A culture in which individual judgement is largely suspended is eo tanto corrupt. But the cure for this malady is not conceptual revision. The concept of knowledge is what it is come what may, and it is indispensable, indispensable in the very form which I take it to have. The cure rather is to seek a clearer understanding of the nature of knowledge and the mechanism of transmission so that we can see how these attitudes can arise, and how corruption can set in. Forewarned is forearmed.
