Comment author: Irgy 07 September 2012 11:53:11PM 3 points [-]

I don't think the abortion example is a good example. The people who say "abortion is murder' genuinely believe it is murder, that everything wrong with murder is wrong with abortion for the same reasons. If you believe in souls and in "thou shalt not kill" as the fundamental reasons why murder is wrong then abortion is murder, not just technically but actually, associations and all.

Now from an outside perspective, you could argue that the reasons why Christianity considers murder to be wrong ultimately boil down to the fact that it's generally a good view to have, which in turn is because of the reasons you give. Those reasons also prevent your typical Christian from feeling a sense of dissonance between the rule 'thou shalt not kill" and reality, because the two mostly match. But to an actual Christian, the reason murder is wrong is entirely "God said so".

My description of Chirstians there of course doesn't cover all of them (indeed no non-trivial description does), but it covers the people making those signs. To them, the problem appears to be that other Christians have forgotten this self evident fact and need reminding of it.

In short, from the worldview of the people making that argument, the fallacy is not being comitted. Whether abortion is murder is not clouding the debate, it basically is the entire debate.Therefore it is not a good example to use for this fallacy.

Comment author: Sperling 08 September 2012 12:51:34AM -1 points [-]

They are still appealing to your feelings about murder and you are entitled to respond "That's TWAitW, the typical case of murder bothers me because of XYZ, which aren't present here." I feel like the phrase "That's TWAitW" is adding to that sentence by explaining that, to you, this might be a case of murder you don't care about, so just hammering on "it's murder" won't persuade you.

"Self evident" beliefs could be the basis of any of the examples, e.g. "theft is wrong because we have a right to our property" could be a belief supporting the statement "Taxes are theft, therefore taxes are wrong." But when they use "Taxes are theft, therefore taxes are wrong" as persuasive argument, they are in fact appealing to my definition of theft and to my feelings towards theft, in an attempt to get from the common ground of "theft is wrong" to the new ground "taxes are wrong." That's TWAitW.

Comment author: Sperling 07 September 2012 11:15:20PM 3 points [-]

How about "Archetypal Association" as an alternative to Guilt by Association? I'd just like a term that is more descriptive than TWAitW without the prior baggage of GbA. "Saying taxation is theft is just an Archetypal Association. In fact, taxation differs from the archetypal case of theft in the following relevant ways..."

Comment author: jimrandomh 15 July 2010 01:46:26PM 2 points [-]

That suggests another variant of the Linda problem: replace the "and" with "and also", and leave the rest unchanged. If this makes a big difference, it would suggest that many of the people who fail on the Linda problem fail for linguistic reasons (they have the wrong meaning for the word "and") rather than logical reasons.

Comment author: Sperling 15 July 2010 10:26:56PM *  4 points [-]

Many subjects fail to recognize that when a 6-sided die with 4 green faces and 2 red faces will be rolled several times, betting on the occurrence of the sequence GRRRRRG is dominated by betting on the sequence RRRRRG, when the subject is given the option to bet on either at the same payoff. This (well, something similar, I didn't bother to look up the actual sequences used) is cited as evidence that more is going on than subjects misunderstanding the meaning of "and" or "or". Sure, some subjects just don't use those words as the experimenters do, and perhaps this accounts for some of why "Linda" shows such a strong effect, but it is a very incomplete explanation of the effect.

Explanations of "Linda" based on linguistic misunderstandings, conversational maxims, etc., generally fail to explain other experiments that produce the same representativeness bias (though perhaps not as strongly) in contexts where there is no chance that the particular misunderstanding alleged could be present.

Comment author: Sperling 20 April 2010 07:04:07PM 0 points [-]

"Define And thus expunge The ought The should ... Truth's to be sought In Does and Doesn't "

-B. F. Skinner (an interesting soundbite from an otherwise misguided disagreement with Chomsky over language acquisition)