Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I don't think it follows that we need to accept every axiom someone proposes, such as what counts as a good enough authority. Nobody's saying we do, and I think there's a good middle ground we all actually inhabit where the director of the CDC, for example, is an authority on diseases when speaking in an official capacity, but we don't give a damn what they think about the latest movies. This isn't a difficult…
I agree about the problem —- I might quibble with the psychology, but close enough. But that’s exactly why the distinction I’m trying to draw is so important. If we keep in mind the difference between what we can rigorously establish and what we’re fundamentally taking on faith (however well-founded), then at least we can talk to people on the other side: clarify core disagreements, examine evidence, and occasionally…
> If we keep in mind the difference between what we can rigorously establish and what we’re fundamentally taking on faith (however well-founded)
From my perspective, we're taking everything in the real world "on faith" (and there is a loaded phrase ripe to be deliberately misinterpreted) to a certain extent, and not just because of brain-in-a-vat arguments. For example, I sit in chairs thinking they're solid objects, but they're made of solid objects and might well collapse under me. In my experience, that doesn't happen to me, so my heuristic is that chairs are safe, but a heuristic isn't rigorous. It's "faith" if you want to phrase things that way.
Moving deeper, I trust that my senses provide me with accurate-enough reflections of reality I can use them to navigate my world safely, but I know enough about neurology to know that that isn't a given. Vision is reconstructed by the visual cortex from messy and incomplete nerve signals from the retinas, our sense of 3D space is reconstructed (based on low-level heuristics) from a pair of 2D images reconstructed from those messy retinal signals, and so on, from the bottom of the neurological hierarchy to the top of the conscious sense of self. The human machine lives off of best-guess reconstructions from incomplete and messy data.
This isn't mere acatalepsy, however: I think humans live in a physical world we're capable of perceiving accurately enough, and comprehending well enough, that we can accurately say we live in a real and comprehensible external Universe, and that some things don't go away even if you don't believe in them. Therefore, it's possible for our heuristic judgements to become more accurate at predicting reality over time, which is what separates knowledge from dogma.
Accepting that an authority is probably more likely to be right than wrong is a heuristic, and that heuristic can and should be improved, but all of our knowledge of reality is heuristic, so trying to treat reality like an axiom system is philosophically wrong-headed and incapable of dealing with the full complexity of reality as well.