Why is tradition a source of greater wisdom?
It is a network of commonly accepted attitudes, beliefs and practices that evolves through strengthening of things that work and rejection of things that lead to conflict and failure. It therefore comprises a collection of habits that have proved useful in a huge variety of practical affairs, and a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive experience and thought. Through it we know subtle and fundamental features of the world that would otherwise escape us, and our understanding of those things takes on concrete and usable form. The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on theory. Taking theory literally can be costly because it achieves clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to articulate. Such things can be important; the reason politics and morals are learned mostly by experience and imitation is that most of what we need to know about them consists in habits, attitudes and implicit presumptions that we couldn’t begin to
Related Questions
- Would the APCD require a source with pre-rule-adoption NEI greater than the threshold to offset its NEI even when it applies for an emission decrease?
- Why can tradition be an accumulation of ignorance, error and vice as easily as of wisdom?
- If using source images greater than 5 Mega-Pixels, will the textures look better?
