Peter Theil:
"One “philosophy of science” argument that I like is that science is supposed to fight a two-front war against excessive dogmatism and excessive scepticism. And so excessive dogmatism is like, say, the decayed Aristotelianism of the medieval church, and that was what science was in some ways fighting in the 17th and 18th centuries. And then excessive scepticism, if I can’t trust my senses and I don’t know whether I’m sitting in front of you, if you’re too sceptical, you also can’t do science. This two-front war is in tension, it’s actually hard to get that balance. The early moderns were more anti-dogmatism than anti-scepticism. If we fast forward to 2023, there are all kinds of things where the scientific establishment would caution us against being too sceptical. We’re not supposed to be vaccine sceptics, we’re not supposed to be climate science sceptics. It’s fighting scepticism in all its forms. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a single instance where a scientist would say, “this is an area where science is too dogmatic today in 2023”. Surely that tells us that somehow science has degenerated into something that’s more dogmatic than the medieval church. If you’re just fighting scepticism it tells you you’re dogmatic. The totalitarian “science” of the early 20th century was like this. It pretended to be anti-dogmatism, anti-supernatural, anti-that sort of stuff. But in reality, the anti-scepticism dominated."
New Statesman
John Gray and Peter Thiel: Life in a postmodern world
A conversation between the philosopher and the venture capitalist.
