It seems you're only looking at history through the lens of one who already agrees with the points you want to make. From that perspective, of course history looks like it supports your position, it's confirmation bias, not compelling argument.
Again, it makes an argument from analogy. I fail to see how it makes a good one; other than by it coming to a conclusion you already happen to prefer. As a step in a rational argument it doesn't seem to contain any data. "They used to do that with homosexuals" is an empty argument without your interlocutor already agreeing that homosexuals and trans people share the same status... and if they agreed on that, there'd be no argument in the first place. You couldn't argue against the incarceration of child molesters by saying "they used to do that to heretics". It was wrong to do it to heretics, it's right to do it to child molesters. The argument is in the case, not the history.
You can't argue anything if your opponents are 'firmly entrenched dogmatists'. I suspect they would disagree and therein lies the problem.
In other words, we take our best guesses as to the goals of the people we're interacting with into account when we model their behaviour all the time, language is no different — Isaac
I had to look that up! — Isaac
Or are you just making the point that its possible for someone to disagree with any analogy, regardless of its merits and that it's also possible to make bad analogies? — Count Timothy von Icarus
you're not just seeing that "people thought about x differently in the past," but you're seeing both a mathematical argument for why frequentism doesn't work in all cases paired with examples of where prior thinkers went wrong and how that has influenced current dogma. — Count Timothy von Icarus
You can say the same thing about a syllogism. That someone could reply to "all men are mortal, Socrates is a man..." with "you can't know that all men are mortal!" doesn't amount to much, no?
Why is an argument from the history of an idea particularly bad? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Anything up to here you'd disagree with? — Srap Tasmaner
Make sense? — Srap Tasmaner
Did you use Yahoo! or did you get someone to help you ask Siri? — Srap Tasmaner
So yeah, adherence to the rules of rational discourse are a really good guide, partly because they themselves are a cost outlay, they show good intent. — Isaac
Heard a fascinating theory along these lines of the origin of organized religion: there have to be burdens, like dietary restrictions and so on, as bona fides of your seriousness about being a member of the group; and these are only necessary because human communities had grown large enough that you might not know right off whether someone is one of us or one of them. Religion then steps in as a kind of passport, offering proof of group membership by having these up-front costs. A shared religion indicates a level of trustworthiness, so then religion can even cross borders and enable the maintenance of trading ties and so on. But again, it has to cost you something more than professing membership or no one will think it a reliable indicator of your trustworthiness. Another way of handling the cheapness of talk there. — Srap Tasmaner
One other thing that occurs me, that comes off the idea of the sentiment of rationality being the feeling of release under tension, is that a lot of what we actually do is more rhetoric than logic, in this sense: if you think of storytelling as the art of withholding information -- so that the audience feels anticipation and is eagerly engaged, anxious for the next reveal -- then we make our little step-by-step points so that the audience will keep getting a little hit of the sentiment of rationality. — Srap Tasmaner
For a logical argument to have persuasive force it is only necessary that I agree with the rules of logic.
do you guys think most science textbooks waste the student's time by going through the history of how a theory came to be developed? — Count Timothy von Icarus
We do also argue to persuade, and sometimes the success of that persuasion is more important than the method. — Isaac
No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what logic alone can do for us. Logic just tells you that, if the premises of an argument are true, then the conclusion follows. — Count Timothy von Icarus
there isn't one set of "the rules of logic," — Count Timothy von Icarus
If I say "cutting taxes won't result in higher government revenues per the Laffer Curve, because we have seen 3 major tax cuts since 1980 and each time revenues have fallen instead of increasing," that is of course an argument relying on historical fact. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I've always thought that these reviews were done so that the student could follow the development of an position. Knowing which alternatives to a theory have been considered and rejected are key to understanding a theory because, especially for a novice, the dominant theory of the day is always going to look undetermined by the evidence they are aware of. It's also true that knowing why a given element was added to a theory gives you much better insight into how to think about that part of the theory. If some constant was added simply because the mathematics for some project wasn't working out, it's good to know it. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The general view is that there's good persuasion, which follows the rules of logic, and bad persuasion, which doesn't.
I'd rather switch that around and say logic is partially descriptive of at least some the types of persuasion we find good, or think usually work, etc. — Srap Tasmaner
A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train?
B: Trains have been carrying passengers traveling for both work and for pleasure since the mid-19th century. They were once the primary form of transportation, but with the advent of gas-powered automobiles in the early 20th century and the modern highway system, particularly in the wake of the Second World War, they were largely displaced by cars, buses, and trucks. — Srap Tasmaner
My issue wasn't really with the use of history per se, but with how it was or wasn't connected to other points being made, which would hold for any sort of obiter dicta in a post. I left in the detail that it was a specifically historical point as an opening for defending a different view of what sorts of connections between points are required in an argument.
This, @Srap Tasmaner, might serve as an example of the costs of engagement. Why am I having to expend time countering an interpretation of an argument that a five year old could see was wrong? Why hasn't that interpretation been silently ruled out by all parties in this thread on the grounds that we're not stupid? We shouldn't be here.
My point is that history alone has no such force since it is inevitably selective. Thousands of things happened in the past, so pointing to A and B as precursors of C doesn't do anything because the argument would be in your choice of A and B not in the mere fact of their near contemporaneity to C.
And to emphasise, this is not the case with arguments relying of basic rules of thought and empirical observation. There are not, in those cases, a myriad of narratives to feely choose from. One might well argue against a tenet of modern physics by claiming maths is flawed, but one would be rightly wary of the commitments that would entail. Not so with historical analysis. I can easily say "No, things did not happen that way" and I'm committed to absolutely nothing else as a result. It's a free pass to disagree.
Again, from your perspective (you agree with the textbook - or trust the institution) that all seems really solid, but it's not the history that's done that, it's your belief in the authority of the person presenting it.
For an argument from analogy to have persuasive force, like the one you presented, I'd need to already agree that the situations are, indeed, analogous...
[Analogies'] merits are contingent on the interlocutor already agreeing with the point it's supposed to be demonstrating to them. What's the point in demonstrating to someone a point they already agree with?
For an argument from analogy to have persuasive force, like the one you presented, I'd need to already agree that the situations are, indeed, analogous... For a logical argument to have persuasive force it is only necessary that I agree with the rules of logic. I could not, of course, but it's not a big ask.
Exactly. It has persuasive force. If we just swap out all the premises for letters and produce a long, non-obvious, logical argument that, say , if A> B and B>C then A>C, that has persuasive force. I can look at that and think "yes, that's right, A is greater than C in those circumstances" I've been persuaded by the presentation.
The longer an more complex the argument, more likely it is to draw out entailment from believing one logical move on other logical moves.
I'm persuaded by the argument that I must accept the entailment, regardless of whether I accept the premises.
>If it rained last night, the lawn will be wet.
>The lawn is wet.
>Thus, it must have rained last night. (proposed entailment/conclusion)
This is a logically valid argument... — Count Timothy von Icarus
My response to you was what it was because you have repeatedly made the claim that the reason arguments involving history aren't valid is because "you can select just the history that proves your point." My point was that this can be claimed against all inductive arguments — Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm going to assume you meant something else by it, like "an argument can be valid without being sound. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes. And I've countered that point several times now, but you're still stuck at the beginning. It's not the same because not all methods are so open, not all methods are so narrowly shared. There are entailments resulting from denying a common form of logic, or an empirical fact that are uncomfortable and which are not necessary when denying some interpretation of history.
Simply put if I say, "the ball is under the cup" and then I show you the ball you could still deny my theory, but you'd have to bring in a mass of other commitments about the possibility of illusion, not trusting your own eyes, ... Commitments you wouldn't like.
I'm sure to someone with your... how do I put this politely... confident way of thinking, the Facts™ of history probably are all written in stone and no doubt all these alternative interpretations are more of those 'conspiracy theories' your priesthood of disinformation experts are working so hard to cull. I can see how the argument I'm trying to make just won't mesh with some mindsets. It may be an impasse we can't bridge.
denying that we can trust the standard fare of physics textbooks re: the origins of relativity or thermodynamics also comes with a lot of commitments. You'd have to assume a lot of people were "in" on a misrepresentation and that they had all coordinated to keep to the same narrative across a wide array of texts, including falsifying and circulating the papers of the original people involved. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Your average person is in a much better position to vet if a science textbook is telling them the truth about the history of quantum mechanics than they are to go out and observe entanglement and test Bell's inequalities. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't buy that this is any reason to assume total nescience is at all rational though. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The fact of our contributions would be lost to the shifting sands of history, unable to be verified. — Count Timothy von Icarus
What? Why would people have to be 'in' on anything? Are you honestly having this much trouble understanding the concept of disagreement among epistemic peers? Some theories are popular, others aren't. Is that such a challenging concept for you?
I've always thought that these reviews [of the origins of scientific theories] were done so that the student could follow the development of a position. Knowing which alternatives to a theory have been considered and rejected are key to understanding a theory because, especially for a novice, the dominant theory of the day is always going to look undetermined by the evidence they are aware of. It's also true that knowing why a given element was added to a theory gives you much better insight into how to think about that part of the theory. If some constant was added simply because the mathematics for some project wasn't working out, it's good to know it.
The question of why a model was abandoned, or why a constant was added is someone's opinion. Someone's theory. Again, from your perspective (you agree with the textbook - or trust the institution) that all seems really solid, but it's not the history that's done that, it's your belief in the authority of the person presenting it. The theory might have been discarded for reasons other than those the textbook claims, the constant might have been added for more rigorous reasons in someone's view but others disagreed (the ones writing the text book)
Really, how?
You're confusing empirical facts for narratives about the motivations, socio-political causes, zeitgeist,... As above, empirical facts are quite easy to persuade others of since we generally share means of verification .
and trust
Any activity which loses sight of life as a whole becomes unmoored and I don't think that's terribly healthy. — Isaac
>If it is Monday, then Grover Cleavland is the President
>It is Monday
>Thus, Gover Cleaveland is the President (proposed entailment/conclusion)
This is a logically valid argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.