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> Unfortunately I have to deal with a lot of people who really only want to win, or who will change their basis of argument in order to win, even if it means es
by jancsika 5y ago
> Unfortunately I have to deal with a lot of people who really only want to win, or who will change their basis of argument in order to win, even if it means espousing the view they initially opposed, as if it was their core line of reasoning!
This is orthogonal to the author's point. E.g., people who only want to win can make use of epistemic legibility to make their wins clear to themselves and/or others. People who change their core line of reasoning can opportunistically switch between two epistemic legible points.
If in either case the speaker doesn't use what the author calls epistemic legibility, then it is difficult to tell what the speaker means.
- ggm 5y agoYes, in strict sense this is all orthogonal. It's riffing down a rathole. What I call "Legalistic" argument is the form which allows two oppositional basis of reasoning to be used simultaneously because any reason to invalidate the case at hand is acceptable, even if contradictory. Working with ex lawyers, debate team members and legal degree graduates I get this a lot. Also programmers. Well, not the ones who do numerical algorithms, they're used to floating point rounding error. I think the fundamental problem can also be cast as the problem of language. A word like "few" is a classic example of an undefined value which is interpreted differently by people. To me, a few has to be below 2% to be disregardable. To others, closer to 10%. In numbers less than ten, a few can mean almost half to some people because three, is a "few" of ten and they forget how close 3 is to 4. This also hinges on "almost" and "nearly" An epistemic line of reasoning would presumably state its basis to approximation?