The main argument between Sarsi and Galileo is whether to trust the authority of authors and highly respected sources such as Aristotle, or to trust evidence and experience. Sarsi argues that it is impossible to definitively prove an idea false because there is always a possibility that the conditions have not been adequately replicated, ideas have validity if many people agree with them. Galileo argues that authority comes not from the masses, but from those few educated and experienced people. He argues that authority comes through controlled study and experience. I think this idea of quality versus quantity is interesting. A lot of this also seems to be inductive vs deductive reasoning. Galileo says ideas that have been shown to not work hundreds of times should be treated as incorrect, however Sarsi does have a point, results are very tricky and sometimes hard to replicate.
We know what we know because of the experiences we have, but I think it is also accepted now that much of what we know is not through experience, but through what others have told us. Galileo would disapprove, but is he always right?
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Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:58 pm Post subject:
Experience was everything to Galileo. He depended on both his experiments and his personal experiences to lead him in his analyses. He points out the simple fact that experience is what is true. Which goes back to our question earlier about what is truth. I believe if Galileo were to answer that question he would tell us that truth is what one can experience and he goes on to say that “It is news to me that any man would actually put the testimony of writers ahead of what experience has shown him.” Telling us that any regular person would believe what they them selves have experienced and not what somebody else tells them to be true. Galileo argues that experience alone has taught us what we know. And we are able to know by using our senses and what we can experience though them. I agree with Julia when she says “I think it is also accepted now that much of what we know is not through experience, but through what others have told us.” Because we now have very reliable sources of information we do not need to do all of the experiencing by ourselves and take much of what we know from other people and sources. This may not have been relevant in Galileo’s time, however I believe that it is relevant today.
What is the role of experience and “authorities”?
How are we able to know what we know?
For Galileo, the main authority must be the self. This authority is gained through personal experience. This was especially true for him if one's own experience contradicted an accepted fact given by historical "authorities" such as philosophers or poets. He found is baffling that some would not become their own authority on the matter but continue to believe the contrasting historical evidence.
I wonder if Galileo had proven something through experimentation if he would expect others to readily accept it as fact or if he would want them to experience it on their own?
It is strange to think that the "absolute" sources of his time that were delivering universal truths to the masses were actually incorrect, and funny that we believe ours today to be correct. I wonder why we are so confident and if that's grounded in anything. We know what we know through learning, whether that be experiencing something ourselves or receiving and accepting the experience of another.
The role of experience to Galileo was very important in "knowing things. He believed that experiences something happening would make that thing that happened real and true. The role of authority was very important to Sarsi in "knowing things." Sarsi would disagree with current experiments if they did not meet the same results as past authorities had said they would. Galileo disagrees with this saying that there is no reason to believe the authorities when there results do meet the results of current experiments because the authorities could have made errors just as he could have.
We know what we know through both experience and authorities. We find out new things everyday through experiences that we have. We know things by reading and learning about things authorities did in the past. I think both experience and authorities are equally as important in knowing things. If you just know through experience you do not get to compare and contrast past and present and analyze them. If you only know from the past you narrow what you know by not realizing that things change.
In order to know what we know, or to acquire that knowledge, we must begin with the realization of not having known whatever information we seek: even Galileo begins his refute against Sarsi by acknowledging he never claimed to have understood comets at all. However, the way that Galileo describes the act of learning in his anecdote seemed to me like an attempt to find a limit, rather like trying to dig to the bottom of a well - the learner wants to hit the bottom perhaps simply to feel a relief that there is no more to be unearthed. To scrape at this bottom, it seems to me you must segment your foundational ideas, things that you have accepted to be true based on the authorities you believe in, so as to discover your mental world does not translate into the physical world surrounding you. This disillusionment requires patience, and more precisely you need a willingness to be counterproductive, an acceptance of error before you even begin experiment or experience, let alone succeed at either. These experiences and experiments were described in a variety of ways - from taste to sound and eggs in Babylon - but some were prioritized over the other. I disagree with this attitude; if a variety of experiences and experiments are used to reach the same ends, and in this process one learns a concept because they approached the same experience/question in a variety of ways, are these other attempts not useful or part of acquiring knowledge?
Regardless, I think that authority is far more significant than experience in this reading. To me, authority was addressed as a member of the “common” public, particularly because authorities used common perceptions, such as Galileo’s idea that waves “are propagated very rapidly...and high tones are produced by frequent waves and low tones by sparse ones” (57) originating from the common respect for/recognition of the four elements being instrumental to the entire functioning of the world. In other words, authority is obtainable, not innate, and I believe it is found in the individual who knows how to approach unknowing. In this way, the authority is importantly temporary - the authority may not know something - and this by no means weakens what they do know - but this hole leaves the individual easily displaced, and as such authority is an interim state.
Last edited by amartinez on Thu Apr 03, 2014 8:27 pm; edited 1 time in total
What is the role of experience and “authorities”?
How are we able to know what we know?
In Galileo's view, experience is the most important thing, especially one's own experience. He believes that people could never think if they don't experience things. Compare to the authorities, normal people's experience is better even if they are normal. But in Sarsi's point, authorities are more important. I think he would say no to a theory no matter how right it seemed as long as it didn't match the authorities' results. Or in another way, authorities' experience is better to believe? Does authorities' experience also could as experience? From the origin, some parts of the experience and "authorities" are the same thing.
We know what we know is trusting our feelings first and then going compare our thoughts we other people. Sometimes other people's thoughts sound stupid, so we stick with what we think. Sometimes we saw people who seem to know a lot and they thinks differently then we struggle. So how do we know what we know depends on each different case.
The reading sounded almost like Galileo was trying to prove something to someone -- though the only technicalities of his work that are ever referenced and that don't serve as analogy are when he mentions comets. With that said, it's a bit hard to grasp what the roles of all these terms are without being given any context, but I'll do my best.
It wasn't hard to miss how Galileo felt about experience and it's significance to gaining knowledge. He was quite clear that, while ignorance was excusable under the context of being obliged to "authority", it was something that could be easily corrected through experience. He mentioned that all the "poets" and "philosophers" would have to do would be to look at the experiments with their own eyes, and then they would re-evaluate their [supposedly critical / disagreeing] arguments.
Now -- what could authority mean? Is it literally whoever was in power at the time, filtering the beliefs of the community? Or does it mean something else -- because in the reading it seemed very vague whenever it mentioned the term, yet at the same time Galileo almost went out of his way to use the word.
What is the role of experience and “authorities”?
How are we able to know what we know?
Galileo really valued experience. He believed, unlike Sarsi, that even if the past says one thing, your experience is the opinion that really matters. If you experience something different from an experiments done in the past, your experience should be valued the highest and not the experiences of people in the past. History is, after all, simply a collective pile of different experiences, some overlapping with others and some that are very common, but still, everything seems to be centered around experience. Sarsi was more on the side of the “authorities”. He believed that what was done in the past was proved to be true, and that if a current experience differs from that past experience, there must be something wrong with the current one. Sarsi seems to try and invalidate personal experience.
We know what we know from personal experience. Instinct and trusting our senses builds up our own personal knowledge of the world. It’s important to consider the “authorities” from the past, and previous experiences and opinions of other people, but the best, and most valid, source for knowledge is one’s personal experience.
The article talks about how experience supersedes authority because something told to us or witnessed in the past is never as true or relevant as an experience seen with our own eyes. I can never be as sure the sky is blue if you tell me it is, then if I look up and observe it for myself. The same goes for experiments. An I experiment I conduct now immediately has more validity than one done years before because it is current and personally experienced. If you said the sky was blue and then I do my own experiment which shows the sky is green, my experiment is immediately correct because I was there to witness it, unlike the one in the past which could have been faked or incorrectly conducted.
The basic sense which guide our daily actions and observations are the only true way to know what we know. External names and objects have no weight compared to something as natural as sight or smell.
Sarsi and Galileo most definitely have good points on both sides. Galileo used an interesting analogy with the race horses. Based on that description, one would conclude that most definitely the single experienced person is the more qualified person to be of authority. The other side of their argument focused on replicating an event through numerous trials. Although you may never be able to recreate a specific event under the same circumstances does not mean it is impossible. It simply means it's really hard to do. You could say that, maybe this cooking of an egg in a sling has too many variables to ever get the right circumstances remotely perfect ever again. Maybe if you tried applying their argument to an event with less variables, would that event be able to be disproved? No, although it seems impossible, there are infinite amounts of ways to look at a situation and find differences between it and the predecessor event. Never can you disprove something because you can't replicate it.
How do we know what we know? We don't. Well, yes technically we do but, I think it's more a deep belief that something is true rather than "knowing." Well, we all know that 1+1=2 and we all know that Jane is the head of school but there are somethings that aren't knowable. Like you may think you had mac n' cheese for dinner last night, there may be proof that you did eat mac n' cheese last night but does that make you know you had mac n' cheese?
Authorities, in theory, seek to explain things to us so that we can use their knowledge as a base for our own observations. Experience can also do this, but it is much easier to simply learn from an authority figure and build from there. The issue Galileo had with this idea is that authorities can be wrong and theories can be disproven, causing us to all need to backtrack and start again. I think Galileo makes a good point arguing with Sarsi; question everything.
Responding to Julia's question- I think it's fine to learn from authority figures as long as we remember that they can be wrong too, and take everything with a grain of salt.
My question- Do you think we have the same mindset today that Galileo did then, namely to question everything?
Galileo was very clear with his opinions on experience and knowledge. He believed that the most clear and undeniable way to know something is to either witness it or perform an experiment yourself. Galileo placed his trust in his own sense and reason (which was also by virtue God's and Nature's) over other people. To him, the amount of witnesses that weren't him didn't matter. Their "authority" over the topic also did not matter, because any sort of reputation could not surpass his own personal viewing.
Authority seemed to manifest itself in other notable intellectuals and philosophers. He believed that his personal reality could be more valid than theirs if he was given the same conditions to test a claim that they were.
In relation to understanding, Galileo made the distinction between inherited meaning/language and experience, placing more value in the latter. In a sense, I agree with this -- I especially enjoyed it when he pointed out the irony in Sarsi's fidelity to the deductions of his much-admired philosophers, in that it often contradicted their approaches to logic, and even went as far to suggest that if they were able to observe Galileo's experiments, they would be persuaded and denounce their former conclusions. Thus, for Galileo, first-hand experience -- an exploration of one's own senses -- overrides the persuasion of "mere language." Of course, Galileo's attacks on Sarsi are more than what they seem -- ostensibly, he's making the point that if we read older philosophers and thinkers with too much credulity, we're not going to make any real progress ("The study of Shakespeare will never produce another Shakespeare"); but, as his argument moves forward and it becomes less an attack on Sarsi and more an assertion of his beliefs, he states that, in reference to the relationship between the senses and language, "This titillation belongs entirely to us and not to the feather; if the live and sensitive body were removed it would remain no more than a mere word"(56).
For some reason, this notion troubles me; there's that famous saying that goes something like, "People would never fall in love if they hadn't heard it talked about." I find that it's almost impossible to determine whether or not language comes before reality (language as an environment), or if language takes on the much less significant role of merely communicating experience that predates it (which seems to be the way Galileo treats language). For instance, you're on a cruise ship, in your room, and it's late at night and you're all snuggled up in bed reading some Homer; the next day, when you get up and go out onto the deck, you look out at the "wine-colored sea." For me, language -- especially written language -- has always played a very profound role in shaping my experiences (perhaps this is the result of me being extremely insensitive). I think these questions of authority and knowledge boil down to the value one places on language, and to what extent the context of language shapes our understanding of the world.
Galileo would argue that the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. His story about the man who wanted to figure out how all sounds were made demonstrates this belief; at the end of the story, the man realizes that he can never know about every sound out there because there are just too many. Galileo uses this man as an example of his belief that the key to wisdom is understanding that there is always more to learn.
Galileo believes that experimentation is the best way to be sure of things, and he uses his own experiments to find what he believes is the truth. However, he is open minded and doesn’t doubt people like Aristotle simply on the principle that they were not scientists – he doubts them because he feels he has proven them wrong. I’m not sure if Galileo would agree, but I totally agree with Eve that learning from both experience and authorities, or our own secondary research, are equally important. We cannot replicate every experiment ever done in order to know for sure that the people got it right the first time, and I don’t think Galileo would say we should. The facts we take for granted are sometimes false or misinterpreted but that doesn’t mean they necessarily are, it just means it’s a possibility. For some things (maybe a lot of things) we have to give the “authorities” the benefit of the doubt.
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