The Nature of Scientific Authority

"We may just haveamy stumbling over a semantic difference in how we're using terms like reasons and reasons for belief, or were a justification for a belief," he says. "If i ask you a question about physics, i will tend to believe your answer because you're a physicist and i am not." But if there are any points on which all physicists agree, 'a non physicist like myself will defer to the authority that consensus' And this is less a statement of epistemology than it is a statement about just the specialization of knowledge and the unequal distribution of human talent,. He adds: we simply don't have time to check every one's work.