For Peirce, the scientific method was the only reliable approach to truth, in the long run. The ‘method of authority,’ as he argued in his 1877 essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’, can be effective in establishing social consensus or unifying a community, but ‘the notion of any weight of authority being attached to opinions in philosophy or in science is utterly illogical and unscientific’ (EP2:206).
But science students accept theories on the authority of teacher and text, not because of evidence. What alternatives have they, or what competence? The applications given in texts are not there as evidence but because learning them is part of learning the paradigm at the base of current practice. If applications were set forth as evidence, then the very failure of texts to suggest alternative interpretations or to discuss problems for which scientists have failed to produce paradigm solutions would convict their authors of extreme bias. There is not the slightest reason for such an indictment.
— Kuhn (1969, 80-81)
Kuhn is surely right that for the student, “learning the ropes” of any special science is not an entirely logical or scientific process, in the Peircean sense of those words. Similarly in a religious path, deference and submission to authority is a standard part of apprenticeship. It is by this route that one learns the basic stance from which discoveries can be made (when the situation becomes too hot for the old paradigm to handle) or learns how to pass on the tradition (in more normal circumstances). More generally still, obedience to authority is probably a necessary stage in moral development. But if development gets arrested at that stage – well, the Nuremberg trials should have taught us what happens then.
In a mature guidance system, ‘there are experts, but no authorities’ (Popper 1990, 34) – ‘experts’ being those with extensive and intensive experience in a given universe of discourse. The real authority belongs to the experience. The experience of a turning sign is the experience of turning and being turned. The truth of a turning symbol and the guidance value of its interpretant depend on the determination of that interpretant by its dynamic object, through the medium of the sign. Authority does not belong to its author, nor wisdom to the wise, nor is prophecy embodied in the prophet, but only in continuous semiosis. Worship of any human author is misdirected. In the idiom of the Gospel of Thomas,
Jesus said, ‘When you see one who was not born of woman, prostrate yourselves on your faces and worship him. That one is your father.’
— Thomas 15 (Lambdin)
As DeConick (2007a, 92) observes, ‘not born of woman’ is the usual code for ‘not human.’ Only the Creator is worthy of worship – the one whose need to be known is the sentient being’s need to know.