[TomCowley]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think you've ever understood what I've been talking about. I've never "rejected the value of debating with imperfect knowledge". I've tried to clarify the nature of some of the imperfections in the whole process of our debates. Understanding the nature of the imperfections in our debates is integral to understanding where we are at with them.

[/ QUOTE ]

If your sole intention is to clarify, then you're coming across differently. I remember you raising relevant objections (rare shoe size evidence isn't as strong if other evidence already pointed to somebody more likely to have that rare shoe size), but I also remember essentially useless objections- either extreme longshots (my judgment) or things in hypothetical examples that were so trivial that nobody else felt the need to mention them explicitly. I also remember a fair number of flat-out rejections of hypotheticals, and not based on a "provable" contradiction with the real world.

The net effect is that you spend far more time attacking the validity of the methods people use to derive conclusions than you do attacking the conclusions themselves, and since people are generally already aware that their starting assumptions aren't perfect, it rarely adds anything constructive.

Or, put more simply, you're often saying that nobody should lay infinite odds on any real-world-based conclusion being correct (which is true), and the rest of us, for practical purposes, are willing to treat things as simply "true" if we estimate them to have long enough odds of being false. We don't care about the exact odds of being wrong as long as they're remote enough (our judgement). Any consideration that only changes the odds from "big enough longshot" to "still a big enough longshot" isn't interesting, and many of your objections fit this category.