[FRIAM] IS: Rhetoric in scientific arguments WAS: FW: Fractal discussion Landscape-bird songs

[gepr]

Well, OK. However, you already know that anything anyone ever says is and can only be from their perspective. Anyone who asserts to speak on behalf of all the authoritative experts in some field for all time is, then, a narcissist or confused. That implies that what you say below supports arguments from authority. I.e. we can't treat a lack of salve as an assertion of objectivity without implicitly asserting that every statement without such salve is fallacious.

Context _always_ matters, even in that most universal of science domains cosmology.

Re: writing for the ages, it would be a mistake to think of a mailing list or discussion forum as if the posters made serious attempt to curate and "deep dive" into their own psyche or professional career arc when they make their posts.  As Marcus pointed out awhile back, these low-overhead postings are supposed to be more like a discussion and less like a formal submission to a journal ... or a well-curated indefinitely defensable statement of one's carefully thought out opinion.

But I smell what I think is an intention, on your part, to focus on something like "authenticity".  And that relates to our long-running thread on realism.  To a Socratic post-modernist like myself, knowing only that we know nothing, most of my opinions are fleeting and ill thought out.  And I change my mind regularly enough.  So, were I to apply the overhead meta-content of "This is what I really believe" for every one of the (often) nonsensical brain farts I emit, that overhead would quickly swamp any potential content.  Instead, I try to form self-coherent _arguments_ about this or that, regardless of whether I believe those arguments or not. I also think it's a bit of a mistake to [hyper] focus on any kind of "authenticity" for any particular sentence, post, or set of concepts.

While I agree that universality (global coherence, anyway) is a worthy objective, it is far out of reach.  (And as the Hilbert program saw, perhaps even fundamentally flawed.)  But attempts at regions of local coherence have a long and glorious history of success.  Hence, it's irrelevant whether you or I really believe what we're saying at any given time.  What's more important is the extent to which the various sayings hang together (or not).



On February 25, 2017 9:52:22 AM PST, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>This is an old issue for me and I have, and probably still am, on both
>sides of it.  From a Pragmatist’s point of view, social salve has
>nothing to do with it.  We are talking about two quite different
>propositions.  When you put the “salve” in, your claim is that this is
>how the world looks “from here, from now”, but you make no universal
>claim.  When you take the salve out, you are asserting that this is how
>the world will look from all points of view in the very long run.  If,
>without “salve”, you reply to this note saying, “Nick, this is bloody
>non-sense!”, you will be saying that “Our colleagues will agree, in the
>very long run, that what you have written is foolish.”  What is irksome
>about such an unsalved claim is not the personal assertion of
>disagreement – we all can handle that – but the implicit assertion of
>universal judgement of all rational “men” upon what we thought was our
>best possible thought.  As scientists, we usually try to speak for the
>ages, as well as for ourselves, unless we say otherwise.  Writing as
>for the ages is more efficient in the long run: either one qualifies
>one’s short term opinions with “salve”, or one has to gin up one’s
>long-term opinions with such words as, “No, this I really believe;  I
>am not kidding here;  this is the truth!”  So, what you represent as
>“politesse”, I would describe as a kind of precision about the nature
>of one’s claims.  
>
> 
>
>What I have just written I guess, I really believe … as a pragmatist.  
>(};-\)