The irony here is that your argument against the anthropologist is very similar to Hughes' argument against the institutional understanding of science.
The point he's making is that if we reject the institutional understanding and take science to have a special legitimacy because of some property of the scientific method (say, theories are falsifiable by empirical data), the arguments of scientists, and the citing of empirical data don't provide this special legitimacy when the method employed doesn't possess that property. Yet when Hawking does metaphysics, the reverence for science as an institution leads people to treat it as they treat science.
I don't know what sounds anti-science about having a problem with that. Being careful about what we call science is a defence against pseudoscience.
This simply is not true. If this sort of a priori judgement occurs, it occurs because Hawking is a famously intelligent and thoughtful person. Of course people take what he says seriously. However, he is also continually engaged in debates with other scientists, often publicly, and is in no way walled off from questioning by either the institution of science or his own fame.
Additionally, I have heard the exact opposite of the sentiment you stated claimed. His biographer, Kitty Ferguson, ludicrously criticized Hawking's atheism as him going beyond his field. As if because one is not a theologian, one cannot discuss religion. What tripe.
You might think that to be the case but there is no evidence for it being so.
Hawking's pontificating on metaphysics are of no more interest to me than Linus Torvald's on laptop screen resolutions or Richard Dawkin's theoretical thoughts on cosmology.
Of course there is no such implication, nor did I make this claim. But it is absolutely true that certain people are simply better at reasoning than other people. This may be because of biological traits, educational difference, difference of habit, etc., but it is certainly true. Any experience with any human will reveal this to you, I think.
> Hawking's pontificating on metaphysics are of no more interest to me than Linus Torvald's on laptop screen resolutions or Richard Dawkin's theoretical thoughts on cosmology.
I am not at all clear why you would say this. In fact, I think you are committing an argument from authority in the reverse. You refuse to listen to this guys because you assume that they are not authorities. That's just bogus and I am sure you know that. Instead, you should listen to Hawking discuss metaphysics and decide if he is worth listening to. You would, I think, do exactly that if it were philosopher speaking.
Why should I listen to Hawking discuss metaphysics? I only have limited time, and I'm entirely unconvinced that would be a good use of it. It's not that I'm refusing, merely that I have no inclination to because I don't have any expectation of particular insight.
-- The famous "reverse" Ad-Hominem attack? WAT
TLDR: Famously intelligent and thoughful people are frequently full of shit, evil, or amoral. Same rules apply. [1]
_________
[1] Its worth noting [a] ad-hominem is not a per-se fallacy; And [b] its useful to questions motives. But since many serial killers, terrorists, and supporters of the hollocaust could be considered "famously intelligent and thoughtful people", it goes without saying that arguments should be evaluated on the merits.
== Fixed that for ya.
. . . Carry On.
The kind of abstraction that works is greatly influenced by its surrounding context. In more complex issues (say in law), appeal to common sense is sometimes more preferable than using the most fashionable 'scientific theory'. You don't like your spouse? How about teaching her evolutionary biology/psychology?
Dogmatism breeds the act of taking these out of context. Some parts of math works in their internal framework(i.e. math), but taking it out of context is at best, dumb, and at worst, harmful. Having theorems giving infinite-length messages yield certain events of probability one makes all 'realistic' outcomes probability zero. Same for theorems too sensitive to perturbation in axioms that removing a single point turns things upside down.
We don't need 'institutional science', or dogma, or 'mathematics strictly contained in universities', all we need is science, is mathematics, is reason, and understanding their application context.
Such debate often occurs with confusing science with 'opinions of the majority of scientists in academia of what's right'. No, science is not the latter.
[TL;DR] Science and math are useful in a very specified context, and as such is a framework of thinking. Those who take some of their context-dependent results universally and urge everyone to accept it is dogmatic, not scientific.
To give one ridiculous example, I had a graduate student in anthropology suggest to me that science needs to be democratized and taken away from the scientists and verified and decided upon by the common man. I asked by what method the common man could do such verification and make any such decisions, as the obvious answer to both is Science.
I do not think criticisms of this type are worth much, especially when they are written on a computer, posted on the internet, and then discussed on forums like this. In a dictum: "Science works, bitches."