by Crimson847 » Sun Aug 19, 2018 4:29 am
Windy wrote:Appeals to authority are always fallacious. Logical fallacies don't require context, they attack the inherent structure of the argument. Except for the slippery slope meme, fuck that meme.
Many informal fallacies (the category both appeal to authority fallacies and slippery slope fallacies fall into) require context. An appeal to popularity, for instance ("X is best because it's the most popular"), is not fallacious if you're discussing something where public opinion is relevant. The best scientific theory is not necessarily the one believed by the most people, but the best marketing strategy
is the one that appeals to the most people. Context thus affects whether an appeal to popularity is fallacious or not.
This isn't even really an appeal to authority, you're taking their words, adding your own interpretations to it, and asserting that your own interpretations have authority.
Can you be more specific? I admit that my earlier assertions about the Trump team's motives for changing the story were interpretation, but I'm not sure what interpretation is involved in repeating someone's argument practically verbatim and then saying "this is that person's argument".
Are you suggesting that I'm leaving out important context or something? I honestly don't understand what your point is. I just want to be wrong. Why won't you make me wrong? :cry:
Well, if I was you and several lawyers contradicted what Trump said I would go study the law and figure it out for myself, or refuse to take a position.
Becoming an expert in any field (including an area of law) takes years, if not decades of study and practice. I could look up the law myself, and do so in cases where an expert legal opinion isn't available or I have specific, articulable reasons to regard that expert as unreliable. However, that sort of personal research is limited because knowing the text of the law isn't enough to know how an actual trial would play out. The law doesn't take corporeal form and smite lawbreakers, as metal as that would be; it's carried out by people, and people have their own agendas, bullshit theories, biases, and blind spots. Knowing what the law says isn't enough to make the best predictions; for one you'd have to know case law and precedent, which involves poring over a potentially vast number of past court cases so you can determine how judges or juries have ruled on the matter in practice. Or you could ask a lawyer (or better yet several lawyers), which in my experience doesn't
always work but generally works better than trying to answer legal questions yourself.
As for refusing to take a position, that's certainly the rational response in many if not most cases. The weaker the evidence is and the greater the consequences for a wrong judgment, the more appealing fence-sitting is. However, not taking a position on an issue by extension means not acting on it, and deciding not to act on an issue is a choice with its own consequences to be accounted for, so simply deciding to never take a position unless you're literally 100% sure (which you should virtually never be about anything) isn't reasonable either.
All of these vague claims and "unanswered questions" mean absolutely nothing. I've seen more evidence that Obama is secretly funding terrorist groups and they're still not convincing enough.
Yep, the existence of unanswered questions means little or nothing about Trump.
Shit I mixed up "valid" with "sound".
Well then, I don't agree that their arguments are generally valid. They're based on certain premises about human nature and "how people work" that make perfect sense to certain types of people on the margins of society, like a miserable couple looking for something to blame for the failure of their ambitions, an anxious and agoraphobic farmer with tinfoil lining his bedroom, or an isolated and bullied teenage boy with no friends. Premises that contained useful if situational insights, but which I no longer regard as entirely accurate.
Now you know how I feel every time I'm right about everything and then everyone else moves their goalposts.
People can be unfair, it's true.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn