Persuade rather than Therefore

[luckyme]

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The best we can do is provide observations, insights, allegories, metaphors, and "reasons" which persuade us to believe as we do. Notice such a belief is then personal and subjective. Not everyone need be so persuaded. Reasonable people can disagree.

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Everything posted here is "open to challenge and examination".

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Even the subjective and personal ones? And how does one go about making a counter argument to them? What if the listener, rightly, refuses to grant them as 'facts' in the argument/exchange?

The examples I used were meant to show you how hopeless that becomes. It almost hurts the ears at times.

A simple example is Splendors trying to support a worldly position with a bible quote ... to an atheist. A counter example is bunny's "it's a personal experience ( I may be misphrasing)" and not claiming it could add weight in a public exchange.

Essentially, we can't grant private knowledge privileged status it the public arena. If your reasons are 'subjective and personal' but somehow 'right', then so are Akhmed's or Chin Chows. Yet the conclusions drawn from them are in direct conflict and all can't be 'right'.

You like to claim 'other sources of knowledge', that does not mean I should acknowledge them ( or Ackme...).

My position isn't a difficult one, why would I back down from it. How could I back down from it?

luckyme

[PairTheBoard]

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Essentially, we can't grant private knowledge privileged status it the public arena.

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So is this finally the coherent statement of your position? Does this premise logically imply that no cognitive response to personal experience can lend any inductive strength to a position?

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My position isn't a difficult one, why would I back down from it. How could I back down from it?


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I didn't say you were backing down from your position. I said you were backing away from even stating it.

PairTheBoard

[TomCowley]

You reject absolute knowledge derived from or applied to the real world. Guess what- you're right. Nobody in their right mind would claim that logic or science can bootstrap from no truth to absolute truth.

You reject the ability to assign an absolute (minimum, nonzero) degree of confidence to some particular knowledge, because we can never have enough knowledge of all other potential confounding factors to assign with certainty. Guess what- you're right again. It's a second-order bootstrapping problem.

Granting these two points, your nihilist approach to real-world scenarios is worse than worthless. Decisions must be made. Imperfect knowledge must be acted upon. Different information must be given different degrees of confidence/credibility. The process isn't perfect, but it's all we have. Science is essentially a neverending search for confounding factors and better confidence estimates, which makes your arguments especially ironic. It is the *acknowledgement* of the limitations of current knowledge that spurs further investigation.

When people on here discuss hypothetical situations with something assumed, we're well aware that assuming any real-world truth automatically makes the scenario not perfectly analogous to the real world. We're well aware that the result of inductive logic is not absolute truth, yet we choose to talk about hypothetical situations and the results of inductive logic anyway, because that's all we have. Rejecting the value of debating with imperfect knowledge is just as worthless and impractical as rejecting the value of making decisions with imperfect information.

[PairTheBoard]

Since Sklansky has crowned you Posting King I'll respond for now. But if you get abusive I'm putting you back on ignore.

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Rejecting the value of debating with imperfect knowledge

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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.

If you read all of this thread you will see that I'm perfectly willing to accept the value of inductive arguments in which the conclusion may be false even if the premises are found to be true! In fact, I am even arguing with Luckyme that he underestimates the possible value of certain types of evidence supporting such arguments. I will also contest people who I think are overvaluing the strength of their inductive arguments.

PairTheBoard

[luckyme]

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In fact, I am even arguing with Luckyme that he underestimates the possible value of certain types of evidence supporting such arguments.

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Whew. I was thinking you'd never get it. thanks.

luckyme

[TomCowley]

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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.

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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.

[PairTheBoard]

I don't find your evaluation accurate. But you are entitled to your opinion.

PairTheBoard

[Philo]

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Philo -
The only way to determine whether the conclusion is more likely to be true than not is to understand the argument, and be able to assess the logical relationship between the premises and conclusion.


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That sounds nice, clearcut, and simple in theory. But when applied in practice to the complexities of ambiguous language, abstract concepts, imprecise analogies, fuzzy probabilities, and the myriad of cognitive responses to the human condition commonly expressed in discussions here, the task you describe is far from logically well defined.


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PairTheBoard

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I never said that evaluating arguments was simple and clearcut. That's you making unwarranted inferences.

I teach logic, so it's no news to me that evaluating arguments can be difficult. Some of the examples you gave are easy to evaluate though. Any argument that uses language ambiguously or employs poor analogies is eo ipso a poor argument.

[PairTheBoard]

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Philo -
The only way to determine whether the conclusion is more likely to be true than not is to understand the argument, and be able to assess the logical relationship between the premises and conclusion.


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That sounds nice, clearcut, and simple in theory. But when applied in practice to the complexities of ambiguous language, abstract concepts, imprecise analogies, fuzzy probabilities, and the myriad of cognitive responses to the human condition commonly expressed in discussions here, the task you describe is far from logically well defined.

PairTheBoard

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I never said that evaluating arguments was simple and clearcut. That's you making unwarranted inferences.

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Not an inference at all. I commented on how I thought it sounded. I expressed the subjective impression it gave me. If it gave me that impression I suspect it might give others that impression as well. If so, your clarification helps and there was some value to my cognitive response to personal experience.



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I teach logic, so it's no news to me that evaluating arguments can be difficult. Some of the examples you gave are easy to evaluate though. Any argument that uses language ambiguously or employs poor analogies is eo ipso a poor argument.

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The thing is, common language is prone to ambiguity even when not used in blatantly ambiguous ways. Thus the difficulty in getting computers to understand it. Also, analogies are rarely if ever perfect. So they are prone to some degree of imprecision even when not blatantly poor analogies. So the degree of ambiguity in the language and the degree of imprecision in the analogies may not be so easy to assess, especially in the discussions on SMP. The assessment is futher complicated when many such imprecise analogies are used to support one inductive argument.

PairTheBoard