lessdazed comments on Fallacies as weak Bayesian evidence - LessWrong

59 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 18 March 2012 03:53AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (41)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: lessdazed 19 March 2012 11:03:03PM *  1 point [-]

Can someone provide the full text of this?

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have a bad philosophical reputation. They seem, however, to be widely used and frequently accepted in many legal, political, and ethical contexts. Hahn and Oaksford (2007) argued that distinguishing strong and weak SSAs may have a rational basis in Bayesian decision theory. In this paper three experiments investigated the mechanism of the slippery slope showing that they may have an objective basis in category boundary re-appraisal.

Also this:

...he argued that the very reasons that can make SSAs strong arguments mean that we should be poor at abiding by the distinction between good and bad SSAs, making SSAs inherently undesirable. We argue that Enoch’s meta-level SSA fails on both conceptual and empirical grounds.

Comment author: gwern 12 April 2012 10:18:24PM 0 points [-]