Heuristics are an epistemic compromise
• Skeptics & Atheists
Michael Drake writes:
Almost every scientific "fact" that we learned in our lives was the result of observation, experiment, and analysis by some expert or group of experts. Tacitly or not, we decide to rely on what we have found through experience to be reliable, truth-discovering and truth-conveying procedures that flow from relevant, expert praxis, to mainstream expert consensus, to expert, peer-reviewed publishing, to mainstream purveyors of knowledge such as textbooks, periodicals, popular science tomes, and thence on to the end users. Instead of subjecting each fact adduced in these sources to a battery of our own tests, we look to indicia of reliable expertise and competence--credentials, peer review, publicized professional reputation, and such--and then decide on that basis whether the purported fact counts as a piece of knowledge.
Knowledge, Expert Opinion and the Public Sphere: Why We Teach the Science We Do