So who's got the right picture? Human Kant with their ideal of intellectual autonomy, or Reed with his idea of intellectual solidarity? This just brings up the question of the value of intellectual autonomy, so why think that it's valuable, or a good thing, to be intellectually autonomous? So, let's look at some of the ways that human Kant might answer that question. Two interesting things they might say. The first is based on that Latin motto that Kant appeals to, Sapere aude, which means literally dare to be wise. But, a little bit less you can literally, you could translate it dare to know. So, if we follow that, slightly less literal translation Kant's suggestion that a person who's beliefs and opinions are based on testimony doesn't really have knowledge. She doesn't really know the stuff that she basis on testimony. So when he asks us to dare to know, he's saying, dare to base our beliefs on something other than testimony, because that's the only way we're going to have knowledge. So you might think that sounds completely wrong. Obviously, you can know stuff on the basis of testimony. So imagine an old friend calls you up and says she's in town for the weekend. You now know that she's in town for the weekend, so there's obviously a sense in which you can get knowledge through testimony. There's a philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato on which genuine or real knowledge requires something more. Requires what Plato called the ability to give an account. So the ability to explain or to situate that knowledge in some broader body of information. And that's something you might think, you can't really get from testimony. That kind of understanding or as Kont might put it, wisdom can only be gotten on your own. You can't get it from someone else. So think of the difference here between someone whose beliefs about the Star ferry in Hong Kong or based about on only reading a Wikipedia article about the Star ferry. Where as someone who lived in Hong Kong their whole live and rides the Star ferry every day. So there is a very real sense in which you might want to say the person who has ridden the Star ferry and lives in Hong Kong knows the Star ferry in a way the person who has merely read about it on Wikipedia does not really know anything at all. She doesn't really have genuine or real knowledge. So if we go with that thought, we're going to be able to explain the value of intellectual autonomy. The intellectually autonomous person is going to be the only person who's in the market for getting knowledge, or understanding, or wisdom, or whatever you like. So the second way you might go about defending intellectual autonomy is by appeal to some social and political considerations. So if you think about our policy or trusting other people's testimony, one thing to keep in mind about it is that it has certain conservative implications. So people have a tendency to let their opinions be shaped by their communities to believe what people around them to believe. And in particular think about the extent to which people have a tendency to have their opinions shaped by the community that they grow up in. People tend to believe, what their parents tell them, or what other people in their community tell them. And this means that we tend to inherit our religious and our political, and our moral views from previous generations, or from people around us. So one way of putting the question about the value of intellectual autonomy is to ask about the value of this tendency. Are we fans of this tendency, do we like it? Or are we more skeptical of it? Reed, given his views about the naturalness of trusting human testimony, is necessarily going to be a fan of this tendency to inherit views from one's community. Whereas Hume, being skeptical of the force of human testimony is not going to be nearly as much of a fan. So how do we answer this question, well how you ask this question is going to depend and how you feel about conservatism and intellectual matters. So if you value progressive and innovative breaks with tradition and rejecting conventional wisdom, new ideas over throwing the old ideas you're going to side with Hume and Kant and the fans of intellectual autonomy. Whereas if you value tradition and the conservation of community beliefs, you're going to side with Reed and the fans of intellectual solidarity. So in any event, these are the issues, I think, that are at stake when we ask this question about the extent to which we should trust other people's testimony.
