Sure. We have to assume stuff. WE have to take the advice and ideas of experts. We also have to doubt experts. I actually don’t think - referring ina sense to what you write below - one can manage without both rationalism or empiricism or finding ways to hone our intuition. No one likes to admit, it seems, that one must rely on intuition and cannot avoid it, but they all do.
Sure, not quite sure how this is more sinister than what I said. I wasn’t saying it was sinister, I was presenting a neutral argument. So this isn’t more sinister, but focusing on dangerous aspects of our situation and what can happen if one denies realism. But the truth is everyone believes in the power of cliffs to kill them. They cannot simply decide not to believe in them unless they are on hallucinogens or psychotic. So we really don’t know what the power of belief is, but you gotta go a hellava lot deeper down to actually shift beliefs.
I think it’s better to say, How can be develop a servicable map when we lack certainty and how can we continue to improve it.
Taken in a broad sense we are all rationalists and we all appeal rely on authority. We simply cannot be empiricists for all the decisions we make.
That’s fine as far as I am concerned, if only the humans in that camp understood that it was possible instead of giving it lip service. They treat anything that consensus science has not verified as false. They seem to have no option of agnositicism and no memory of the history of science.
They also do not understand that scientific models are nto the same as research data. Nor do they understand that science has metaphysics and this can be wrong also, so the way they look at anomolies is pathological. And interpersonally, they are very damaging, especially as a group. They are holding back knowledge because they think their models (that is metaphysics) rules this knowledge out. They are just another religion that also does empirical research within their models.
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Sure, but the empiricists are also using rationalism. Like - the universe has natural laws, for example. Sheldrake called them out for that, and got called a nutcase, though in the last decades research is now showing that things we considered laws and constants are not that. They constantly use deduction from models to rule out things, not understanding that their models have changed metaphors and paradigms in ways that not even Kuhn wanted to look at. And there is still this very harsh male mental rage guiding the communities reaction to anything that smacks to the scientists and their groupies as religious, spiritual and emotional. Couple them with the technocrats controlled by the corporations and you have some really pernicious real life changes happening worldwide by these supposedly rational people.