Hi CTD

I know you will deny it but I think you have made a breakthrough here. You have realised that the source of all knowledge is, at its root, empirical. You may ask other people for their empirical knowledge or that of others they have heard from directly or otherwise, we have to do that as we can’t all reinvent the wheel as it were, but those peoples knowledge will lead us to an empirical source if we follow it back as far as you can go.

Now you just have to come to terms with the idea that non empirical sources can lie, cheat, screw up, misunderstand, deceive, suffer from delusions, fall for illusions, misinterpret, forget, confabulate etc while empirical sources can’t.

Obviously we must take into account the limitation of all sources when we chose to use them. Empirical data can be hard to find or interpret but if we wish to know what happened more than a few thousand years ago we have no choice, there is no other source. Even more recent history shows that human accounts are unreliable and the older they are the more unreliable they are likely to be. The real trick is to work out how to find the good data amongst the bad. We have a very effective system for doing so, its call the scientific method.

So why would you prefer word of mouth rather than going to the source, empirical observation, when it is available when there is doubt about some information?

I agree that that was all too obvious to need stating but it seems that it did need to be spelled out here.

In Reason

Russell