I think this article is badly argued, but about a topic which interests me greatly. There are basically three epistemologies. There's the constructive (mathema

I think this article is badly argued, but about a topic which interests me greatly. There are basically three epistemologies. There's the constructive (mathematical, proscriptive), the empirical (science, emotional), and trust. The constructive and empirical epistemologies don't separate as neatly as we would like them to, but a constructive argument basically looks like: "here's a thing that you definitely believe, and here is an implication of that, therefore you believe in the implication" aka modus ponens. The empirical epistemology goes: "You have made a lot of observations, here's a simple explanation for all of them that you may go check", more or less the scientific method. The trust based epistemology is just: "If I can establish facts about you, then I can establish facts about the things that you claim to believe, without having to see the receipts" Each of these epistemologies has its own definition of argument, and they're all similar, but they're distinct, and the author isn't being clear about which one he means. In my estimation, the passages about ancient history are a reflection of him mistaking trust based arguments for empirical ones. This is a very common mistake. An empirical argument is of the form "Here is the test that I used to differentiate my explanation from other explanations, and why I think this is a good test", whereas the trust based argument for the same explanation would be "Here is the data that my theory explains".