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So I was in a thread in the ED subforums forums in a debate.

Now I won't tell you which stance I had chosen nor what debate it was to prevent biased reasoning from you lot.

Well, I posted a source, however, the opponent gave their reason to undermine it.

This is what this person said:



Now regard the bold points. "He may be right in what he says, but that does not mean we should listen"

I have two reasons to dismiss this argument:

~Subjective analysis. The source was not even looked at to even determine its validity. There was no counter argument to the source. It was just stated that "it isn't valid". Through the person's own subjection they compared my source to a crazy street bum and dismissed it.

~Blatant admittance to confirmation bias in the bold points. This person implied "the source may be right in what it says, but that does not mean I should look at it".

I then told this person what I just stated and threw in my usual sarcastic remarks that are usually hard to rebut. But here was the reply:




What - The - ********- ? Do those two analogies even go hand in hand?

This person was also appealing to authority as valid counter arguments when they weren't trying dismiss my sources through subjection.


Discuss:
=====
~Does the first analogy comply with the second analogy?
~Was the source undermined from the person's own subjection?
~Is "subjective analysis" valid in a scientific debate when determining the validity of a source?
~Was what I stated confirmation bias on the opponent's part?
~Is saying that a source is not valid without looking at it a proper tactic in a debate?
~How bad is appealing to authority when I state the opponent is doing it in a debate, yet they continue?

Actually, that falls under the most common philosophical definition of knowledge: JTB.

Justified True Belief.

For something to be considered Knowledge, for one thing it has to be a belief. That is you have to actually have it in your head. Secondly, it has to be true. Self-explanatory. And thirdly, it's truth has to be justified. It can't be simply true by chance, you have to have probable justification for the belief. Saying that the sky is blue because cows are made of cheese while technically true, does not count as knowledge because the belief is not fully justified. The justification has nothing to do with the point, and is furthermore, untrue.

So he's right on that note. Belief must be justified in it's truth value to count as knowledge. However, saying that something is clearly wrong because the source has said other wrong things is also a fallacy. And it's just bad form to claim that a given justification is insufficient without giving probable cause.

Yeah, that's bullshit. People like that anger me. Well, everyone angers me. But they anger me more.

Saying sometimes right and completely right are two different things. "Sometimes, I can guess your age." That's not a psychic power. That's good guessing. "No matter what, I am never wrong when I guess an age." Well hell, you have something amazing there!

The problem with what someone else said (I couldn't be bothered to remember the name) is that they said that Whoever-you-were-debating-against was right in the respect that he needed justification. That is wrong. Every single website has either the justification of another website, or what they themselves know. Meaning that no website is justified, because they took it from unjustified web sites. So no source is right, and everything we hear on the internet is useless. That is also the problem with said person's arguement. Eventually, you can't prove anything. And that makes it so everything you want to believe is true. It would re-define the word true. And that would make life suck.

Ah, great idea. Doing it right now biggrin

~Does the first analogy comply with the second analogy?

Pretty much.

~Was the source undermined from the person's own subjection?

Probably.

~Is "subjective analysis" valid in a scientific debate when determining the validity of a source?

Well....some of it has to be subjective.

~Was what I stated confirmation bias on the opponent's part?

...um, do you mean confirming bias? Probably.

~Is saying that a source is not valid without looking at it a proper tactic in a debate?

If by that you mean not knowing anything about the source, then, no you cannot dismiss a source without a reason.

~How bad is appealing to authority when I state the opponent is doing it in a debate, yet they continue?

Appealing to authority is just as ridiculous, and like Nietzsche (the Gaian) said, this is a sort of inverse. It doesn't matter who you are, but rather what you say. If you can't confirm the truth about a statement, you can't tell whether the statement-maker is right or wrong.

Example: Some global-warming-denying climatologists will argue that Al Gore must be wrong because he isn't a climatologist. But his credentials don't matter; as this person said, a simple bum could be right about something. Who he is doesn't make him wrong. It may make him more likely to be wrong about something; likewise, Al Gore probably does not know everything about climatology. But if he's right, he's right.

He sounds like one of those wanna-be genii that Gaia is littered with these days... I'm amazed natural selection hasn't gotten round to offing them yet.