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

[glen ☣]

Heh, your lack of social salve has left me unclear on whether I should respond or which parts to respond to. >8^D  So, I'll just respond to what I think is the most important point.

>  That implies that what you say below supports arguments from authority. [NST==>I don’t think we can EVER escape arguments from authority.  Science is locked in a matrix of trust.  Doubt in science is really important, but it has to be relatively rare, or we would never know which of a million doubts to take seriously.  <==nst] 

I think you use "doubt" differently than I do.  Even if we replace "doubt" with "falsified", it's not a binary thing.  When I doubt something an authority says, I'm not refuting, denying, or rejecting it.  I'm simply expressing that the saying probably has caveats, some of which I might know about, some of which I might not.  The same is true of (critical rationalist) falsification.  Even though we know Newtonian physics isn't end-all, be-all True with a capital T.  It's satisficing in most circumstances.  To (When I) say it's been falsified simply means it has caveats.

And, in this sense of the two terms, doubt and falsification are _rampant_ in science.  When you try to replicate some other lab's experiment, you must doubt, say, the methods section in their paper, usually because you don't have the exact same equipment and the exact same people ... doubt is what promotes reproducibility to replicability. ... at least in this non-scientist's opinion.

>  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. [NST==>Yep.  All statements are more or less fallacious.  So does that render all statements the same?  If I flip the coin once and it comes up heads, what evidence do I have that the coin is biased.   None.  If I flip it twice, a little.  If I get a hundred heads, the probability that the coin flips represent a population of fair coin-flips is finite, but vanishingly small.  I’ld bet on it, wouldn’t you?  All statements of certainly of that character.  <==nst]

No, not all fallacies are the same.  Different statements are fallacious in different ways.  And the argument from authority fallacy, in my opinion, is the worst one because it's opaque.  You can't learn from it.  At least with, say, assuming the conclusion, it encourages us to understand the relationship between premises and conclusion... it helps us grok deduction as well as the host of concepts surrounding languages, formal systems, algebras, etc.

Your inductive argument, by the way, isn't obviously an argument from authority (obvious to me, anyway -- see how annoying it is), particularly with (as someone recently phrased it) interpersonally assessable things like coin flipping.  Anyone with the usual complement of sensorimotor manifolds (!) can put in place the kernel and carry out the iteration.  The only authorities involved are whatever physical structures are required for coin flipping and counting.

But, more importantly, self-consistency (local coherence) is the governor of induction.  Can you imagine if "successor" were redefined at each iteration?  So, it helps make my larger point that it's irrelevant what you or I believe or state with authority.  What matters is whether the method(s) hang(s) together.

-- 
☣ glen