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“Don’t Just Take Their Word for It” — How Cultures Across the World Teach Us to Think for Ourselves

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“On the word of no one.” — Royal Society motto, 1660
“Believe nothing merely because it is said.” — Buddha, ~500 BCE
“Country is the teacher.” — Aboriginal Australian wisdom
“When you do not know, say you do not know — that is knowledge.” — Confucius, ~500 BCE

The idea that you shouldn’t blindly accept what you’re told — even by elders, teachers, priests, or governments — is sometimes painted as a modern, Western, or rebellious concept.

In reality, it's ancient. And global.

Science Didn’t Invent Skepticism — It Systematized It

The Royal Society of London — the world’s first scientific institution — adopted this Latin motto in 1660:

Nullius in verba — “On the word of no one.”

It was a rejection of inherited authority. Don’t take the king’s word for it. Don’t take Aristotle’s word for it. Test it. Observe it. Replicate it.

But this wasn’t a new attitude. It was a formalization of something many traditions had long practiced in different forms.

The Buddha’s Method: Don’t Believe It Just Because It’s Tradition

In the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha tells a group of villagers:

“Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon the authority of your teachers or elders. But when you know for yourselves that something is wholesome and good… then accept it and live by it.”

This was around 500 BCE. Long before peer review — but already rooted in direct observation, critical thinking, and experiential truth. Buddhism, at its core, is less about belief than about method: observe your mind. Watch how reality unfolds. Draw conclusions from what endures under scrutiny.

Confucian Humility: Know What You Don’t Know

At the same time in China, Confucius was laying out his own framework for epistemic integrity:

“Shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, say that you know it. When you do not, say that you do not — that is knowledge.” — Analects 2:17

Confucianism is often seen as hierarchical and tradition-bound, but it also places strong emphasis on honest self-assessment, critical self-cultivation, and learning through dialogue and correction — not blind obedience.

Aboriginal Australia: Knowledge Through Country, Not Command

Aboriginal knowledge systems are often framed as purely traditional or religious. But that’s a colonial misreading.

In many Aboriginal cultures:

“Country is the teacher.”

This isn’t metaphor. It’s an epistemic framework.

Truth is not something someone tells you. It’s something you come to know through attention, relationship, pattern-recognition, and lived experience with land, weather, animals, and story. Knowledge is empirical, but encoded in narrative, song, and ceremony — not reduced to abstract propositions.

Songlines, for example, are oral maps that transmit navigation and ecological data across generations. If the knowledge were wrong, you’d die. That’s selection pressure. Not dogma.

And unlike Western science, which often aims for universals, Aboriginal knowledge is place-bound, layered, and deeply contingent — a different kind of rigor.

It may not say “Nullius in verba,” but it lives by the same code: don’t believe it until the land proves it to be true.

Other Echoes of Epistemic Integrity

This principle — “test before you trust” — recurs again and again in wisdom traditions:

  • Jewish Talmudic tradition: “Who is wise? One who learns from every person.”
  • Islamic Hadith: “Seek knowledge even as far as China.”
  • African proverb: “Wisdom is like a baobab tree — no one person can embrace it.”

In each case, the message is clear: truth isn’t owned by any one tradition, authority, or lineage.

So What Does This Tell Us?

It tells us that:

  • The impulse to question is not modern — it’s universal.
  • Science didn’t invent epistemic integrity — it codified it.
  • Tradition doesn’t always mean dogma — sometimes it encodes hard-won empirical truth.
  • We dishonor both modern science and ancient traditions when we reduce them to slogans.

Wherever people had to survive, they had to think. Where truth mattered — for farming, for medicine, for orientation, for social cohesion — dogma died, and method survived.

The best traditions didn’t preach. They taught you how to listen — to the world, to your own observations, to the patterns that stayed even after the storyteller moved on.

Final Word?

Let’s return to the Royal Society:

Nullius in verba — “On the word of no one.”

A fine motto.
But not a unique one.

Variations of this principle — epistemic humility, observational rigor, skeptical independence — have appeared in every part of the world where people took truth seriously.

It’s not a Western invention.
It’s a human inheritance.