A little over a week ago...

...I wrote a post that tried to answer, among other things, "How exactly do we know what we think we know?" (I doubt that I persuaded anyone; I'm not sure I even persuaded myself.) 

It was in answer to the question, "Have you actually read the complete (Affordable Care Act)?" (The short answer is, "No.") 

This morning, Stanley Fish has a post in the Times in response to responses he received from an earlier post he wrote titled, "Citing Chapter and Verse: Which Scripture Is the Right One?" 

Fish writes (and it is always advisable to have a bottle of aspirin handy when reading him; headaches have been known to ensue): 

If you hold to the general skepticism that informs scientific inquiry — that is, if you refuse either to anoint a viewpoint in advance because it is widely held or to send viewpoints away because they are regarded as fanciful or preposterous — how do you respond to global-warming deniers or Holocaust deniers or creationists when they invoke the same principle of open inquiry to argue that they should be given a fair hearing and be represented in departments of history, biology and environmental science? What do you do, Hayes asked, when, in an act of jujitsu, the enemies of liberal, scientific skepticism wield it as a weapon against its adherents? 

Dawkins and Pinker replied that you ask them to show you their evidence — the basis of their claim to be taken seriously — and then you show them yours, and you contrast the precious few facts they have with the enormous body of data collected and vetted by credentialed scholars and published in the discipline’s leading journals. Point, game, match. 

Not quite. Pushed by Hayes, who had observed that when we accept the conclusions of scientific investigation we necessarily do so on trust (how many of us have done or could replicate the experiments?) and are thus not so different from religious believers, Dawkins and Pinker asserted that the trust we place in scientific researchers, as opposed to religious pronouncements, has been earned by their record of achievement and by the public rigor of their procedures. In short, our trust is justified, theirs is blind. 

(My emphasis.) 

It doesn't stop there; I'll let you read the rest. But it makes me think that the best response to my questioner would have been with another question or questions: What bill? The Affordable Care Act? What's that? Was it passed? How do you know? And how do you know it's 2,700 pages long? Have you seen it with your own two eyes? 

But that would have been as annoying as his question.