| Yeah, you are in a lot of trouble, buster. One of the things that is, in fact, an important element of "critical thinking" is the acknowledgement that we depend a lot on authority to provide us with facts and techniques that we can neither verify for ourselves, nor independently generate. A good deal of what we "know" is based on faith, not in the sense of a "leap" beyond reason, but in the sense of trust in an authority, presumably well- founded. We are fortunate to live in an age of highly reliably information, because of technical resources, improved methods of acquiring and judging evidence, and the fact that we are rich enough as societies to dedicate a lot of resources to the accumulation of knowledge. That is even more a reason to be conservative about sources. Peer review is still the best way of validating someone's researches, and although today's controversy might be tomorrow's settled fact, it is safest to deal in well- established fact and highly critiqued theory from the community of scholars. Certainly, controversial assertion should be flagged for what they are. |
