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WrongBot comments on Forager Anthropology - Less Wrong
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I think that I'm placing more emphasis on whether his arguments are sound, and you're more concerned with their validity.
Yep. When evaluating a dispute between someone and Pinker I started by saying that I could take it for granted that his arguments are sound, but that it seemed to me that their arguments might be worth-while and scholarly. (I could also have said fact-filled and valuable, especially if not taken literally, as a source of added validity).
In practice, arguments that aren't sound are practically never fully valid, but they are frequently a valuable complement to sound arguments as part of how validity of belief is achieved.
Did you mean valid here? Its the soundness of Pinker's arguments that I am claiming to have undermined, so I'm kind of confused.
I think that my internal argument-evaluation-algorithm focuses most of its effort on premises and treats the subsequent reasoning as a mostly mechanical and straightforward process. Getting enough and good enough data together instinctively seems like the greater obstacle to me, possibly because I do fairly well with formal logic.
Yep. My mistake.
Ah. The problem with treating reasoning as mechanical is that almost no-one actually does reasoning reliably enough for that to work. If they did, the quality of public debate would be completely different.
Absolutely agreed. I know I don't reason as reliably as I seem to generally expect. This is my bug, not the world's.