Brandon9000 wrote:blatham wrote:Brandon9000 wrote:blatham wrote:Quote:God, you're dense. I didn't say that either. Let me repeat slooowwwllllyyyy. When I make a blanket statement that he has told the truth about everything or a statement asserting that he has told the truth about something specific, I will provide evidence or a logical argument. I have said what I have said, and not what I have not said, as though that weren't obvious.
What I have mostly done so far is to ask for evidence in cases where someone made a charge of lying.
Yes, and you characterize "evidence" in unique ways. What we are now doing is taking your methodology for a test run to see if it is in any sense useful. I'm assuming you think it is, so this ought to pose no problem for you.
Let's try it this way. Has Hillary Clinton lied?
What makes you think I'll take your quiz? My only comment to you is that if I make any accusation of any susbtance against anyone, I will provide evidence or a logical argument to back it up, and respond to reasonable debating challenges, which is more than can be said for most of your crowd.
I fully suspect you won't take up this challenge. Just thought everyone should know that.
All posters who accuse someone of lying or other wrongdoing are obligated to provide evidence to support their contentions, at least if challenged. You have not challenged me to support any contention I have made. You've challenged to me to answer questions of yours, which I am under no obligation whatever to answer, and to support assertions I have not made.
Such "obligation" is to intellectual integrity, yes? And such intellectual integrity is held worthwhile and necessary as the means by which we will better avoid holding/accepting ideas which don't accurately reflect the real world. We'll be better off if we get it right and worse off if we get it wrong.
"Nicotine has no carcinogins" and "Nicotine has significant carcinogins" are truth claims for which evidence and reasoning ought to be provided because if we get it wrong, either an industry will likely be injustly penalized or, on the other hand, a lot of people will die unnecessarily.
Establishing which of those two statements is true and which false - or as is commonly the case in scientific investigations, which is more probable and has the greater weight of evidence to support it - is a scientific endeavor. We bring the mature and well-developed methodologies of scientific procedure to the matter. In doing so, we end up with tentative conclusions - tentative "knowledge".
Courtrooms are different, and for good reason. Where potential penalties might be levied, including incarceration or even tying someone down to the dancing volts in the fritterizer chair, the criteria for establishing proofs and probabilities re innocence/guilt and truth/falsity are often more acute. We set high bars for establishing "proof" (though lower if they happen to be driving cab in Anbar province). Again, we have in our jurisprudence, a mature methodology for proceding in our pursuit for truth and in our pursuit towards justice/fairness. But even here, we acknowledge the tentative or probablistic nature of our conclusions. OJ Simpson.
What about the sphere of political debate? What "proof" criteria apply or ought to apply? What constitutes necessary/sufficient evidence for a claim? "Liberals are weak on defence", for example. Or for the assertion that "George Bush is the worst President ever"? And why bother even caring? Are these things important in the manner of whether tobacco is a carcinogin or whether Joe Schmidlapp really put a bullet through his uncle Jim's kneecap? If we are here debating politics on a2k, we probably do think this stuff is important. We want to get it right because we think we'll be better off if we do and worse off if we don't, as a society.
You and I and most everyone else would agree that similar methodologies apply here too in order to get closer to the truth of things. We agree that someone who makes a claim or assertion in debate that X is true or false ought to support that claim or assertion with evidence or reasoning that upholds or verifies or lends credence to the claim/assertion.
The problem with the little game you are playing here, brandon, is that your goal isn't trying to get at the truth of things - or the
probable truth of things. Your goal is defending George Bush with whatever means might come to hand. And that shows up in the "methodology" you insist applies here. For example, we cannot say Bush has lied unless we can duplicate the internal contents of Bush's mind and intentions. We don't KNOW, you'll insist, that Bush lied because none of us was in that room at that moment. Etc.
And that's why you won't take up the challenge to your methodology I proposed (as, of course, a scientific investigator would be intellectually obliged to do). It's functionally useless because you've designed it exactly that way, whether you realize it or not.
