Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Idolizing the status quo


Whenever Paul Tobin runs out of bad arguments, which doesn’t take long, he retreats into his all-purpose appeal to “mainstream” scholarship.

But that’s intellectually stultifying. Imagine if we applied his policy to medical science. There would be no incentive to advance medical science, for we’d always default to the status quo. Unquestioning allegiance to “mainstream” opinion would lead to scientific stagnation. If Tobin had his way, we’d still be using Galen and the “four humors” of Hippocratic medicine.

Any challenge to the Medieval status quo would be treated as heretical pseudoscience. 

1 comment:

  1. I do find some of his responses quite stunted in that regard.

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