All of Keith_Coffman's Comments + Replies

What part of

Also note that you don't get to define the terms that I'm using - I do.

do you not understand?

I know I am using non-standard definitions in the context of this discussion in order to make my points more clear.

Your argument has boiled down to "MY definition of your words says that you are saying X, which is wrong" when I am in fact saying Y, which you have not responded to. I don't care about what you (or Google) say evaluating a claim is supposed to mean, because what we are discussing is what I mean when I say it. The "idle ... (read more)

A conceived state of reality is something that happens in your head, not in writing or spoken aloud. The utterance of a claim is an attempt to convey this conceived state to someone else. You seem to be bordering on rejecting objective reality altogether; if there are no minds in the universe is a rock still a rock? In such a universe there would be no language, but you would agree that A still equals A, right? If you were alone and had no one to talk to, could you not still understand your surroundings via internal models of reality?

Edit: in short the fact that A=A, the concept that A=A, and the utterance A=A, are all unique things and to try to combine the latter two is unjustified.

The entire point has been that you have consistently said that you can evaluate utterances independently of contingent features of the speaker and context.

You are putting words into my mouth. Note that I have never even used the term "utterance" to this point in my statements. Also note that you don't get to define the terms that I'm using - I do. I'm glad that you listed these propositions in several point, since it makes this easier to deconstruct:

Let me state this in rough propositions:

• a. evaluation is a judgement of aspects of things r

You are misrepresenting the statement-response structure.

I simultaneously say two things:

1) You must understand a claim to check it, else you wouldn't know what to check. (we both agree here, I think)

2) Given that you can understand a claim, it can be checked

You say "Hold on, you can't understand a claim without the context!" And I agree. In the practical reality that we must face on a daily basis, you can't really ever avoid the fact that we must communicate via language and we also often imply some additional details, such as time/location.

Let... (read more)

You can't check a claim independently of understanding it, for which contextual knowledge is necessary. It's as simple as that.

I know you can't check a claim without understanding it. I've said as much (the qualifier you keep mentioning). My point is that, given you do understand it, you can check it.

I am also confused as to why your think all claims are empirically verifiable, i.e. if X is Y and Z is X then Y is Z. Most language is not world-referent.

I don't think that all claims are empirically verifiable - that was my mistake in writing. However ... (read more)

I think I see where things aren't matching, and aside from your last comment I think it's a matter of definitions rather then concepts.

Firstly, when I say "evaluate a claim" I mean checking that it matches with objective reality - NOT understanding what the claim means in it's linguistic context. If I managed to translate "barkbark22" into something I understood, I could then evaluate it. If you want to say that my definition of the phrase "evaluate a claim" is faulty, fine, but you should now understand what I mean by it.

Sec... (read more)

My point was not really related to your discussion, I just wanted to clarify on your paraphrasing of "scientists think it works, so who cares what philosophers think."

I think it is slightly silly to worry about who thinks it works when the fact of the matter is that it works - this is not a point directly against your comments, just a point of clarification in general.

Each reiteration of "how someone formed their belief" is an attempt on my part to clarify the meaning, since you yourself just said that it is "extremely ambiguous." The concept I am attempting to convey remains the same, however.

I will bring in a quote by Shakespeare: "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Language is the means by which we communicate information interpersonally. Language is important, as it is imperative that the sender and the receiver internalize the same concept. However, the rose and how it sm... (read more)

Do scientists think it works, or does it work? The end result is a model for a particular phenomenon which can be tested for accuracy. When we use a cell phone we are seeing the application of our understanding of electromagnetism, among other things. It's not scientists saying that science works - it's just working.

I agree. I'm glad we finally got there. I have been saying your equivalent of "you have to find it intelligible" this whole time. You have to understand the claim to test it.

But you don't have to understand how they came to that conclusion. In case it's not clear, that's how I've been using the term "belief structure."

By the way, it would greatly help the discussion along if you answered all non-rhetorical questions, because that would help me understand where things aren't clicking.

*Edit: Upon rereading our discussion, it looks like ... (read more)

Alright, since you could not verify the Earth being round without knowing my belief structure...

2+2 = 4

You don't know my belief structure. Is it true?

I'm not asking you if you know that off the top of your head, I'm asking if you could go out and check to see if it's actually true!

That's what I mean by evaluating a claim - can you verify it? I'm sorry, but it's asinine to say that you cannot verify it because you don't know how I came to the conclusion. You seem to be arguing something about sharing my language as maintaining your point. I'm past that. If you understand the claim, you can test it.

If it is divergent, then this

Let me distill this and see if you follow: We need to know what a claim is actually claiming - that can depend on context. Given that you do know what a claim is claiming, its veracity does not depend on context, nor the belief structure of the person behind the claim.

is what I meant. To provide an example, (which can quite often help in these situations):

I claim that the earth is approximately round.

You don't need to know how I came to that conclusion in order to evaluate my claim.

Had I claimed something a bit more comple... (read more)

Let me distill this and see if you follow:

We need to know what a claim is actually claiming - that can depend on context.

Given that you do know what a claim is claiming, its veracity does not depend on context, nor the belief structure of the person behind the claim.

The meaning of a claim can, in fact, change based on the context. Moreover, the truth of a claim may change with time (for instance, the claim "Elvis is alive" was at one point true and is now false. Also note that, in the context of me making up a simple example of a claim to demonstrate my point, the meaning is likely referring to the famous performer Elvis Presley rather than any person named Elvis.

Thus we can see how there are a few things that we need to keep in mind when we address a claim, much as you have said above. However, the truth of... (read more)

I think we should also separate the subjects of the psychology behind when this might happen and whether or not we are using scales.

It may indeed be the case that people are bad accountants (although I rarely find myself assuming these implied things, and further if I find that my assumptions are wrong I adjust accordingly), but this doesn't change the fact that we are adding +/- points (much like you're keeping score/weighing the two alternatives).

Assuming a perfectly rational mind was approaching the proposition of reactor A vs reactor B (and we can eve... (read more)

I would call coming to conclusions like this a shortcoming of our rational thinking, rather than the weighing of benefits and costs to a decision. What HalFinney said is completely right, in that we very often have to pick alternatives as a package, and in doing so we are forced to weigh factors for and against a proposition.

Personally, I wouldn't have "factually incorrectly" jumped to the conclusion you stated here (especially if the converse is stated explicitly as you did here), and I think this is a diversion to the point that you are necessa... (read more)

Sorry for following you around so much (I just read this article since you linked to it in our other discussion)

There are two main points, both of which have largely been said or touched on already in your discussion here:

1) When discussing an event or something "playing out," we are talking about a cause and effect. Despite the fact that many things in life have many factors, there are always positive causes for things, which may or may not have counteracting factors. When we want to describe an effect of interest, then the simplest way to do it... (read more)

I agree that it is largely off-topic and don't feel like discussing it further here - I would like to point out that the principle of indifference specifies that your list of possibilities must be mutually exclusive and exhaustive. In practice, when dealing with multifaceted things such as claims about the effects of changing the minimum wage, an exhaustive list of possible outcomes would result in an assignment of an arbitrarily small probability according to the principle of indifference. The end effect is that it's a meaningless assignment and you may as well ignore it.

I'm making a separate reply for the betting thing, only to try to keep the two conversations clean/simple.

Let's muddle through it: If I have a box containing an unknown (to you) number of gumballs and I claim that there are an odd number of gumballs, you would actually be quite reasonable in assigning a 50% chance to my claim being true.

If I claim that the gumballs in the box are blue, would you say there is a 50% chance of my claim being true?

What if I claimed that I ate pizza last night?

You might have a certain level of confidence in my accuracy and m... (read more)

There's a whole bunch of information out there - literally more than any one person could/cares to know - and we simply don't have the time (or often the background) to fully understand certain fields and more importantly to evaluate which claims are true and which aren't. In other words, reality is objective and claims should be evaluated based on their evidence, not the person who proposes them.

It would seem to me that these claims aren't consistent. I agree with the first claim, not with the second. It's true that experts' claims are objectively and

Interesting stuff. I am all for trying to improve peoples reasoning skills, and understanding how particular people think initially is a good place to start, but I'm a bit concerned about the way you talked about knowledge in here (and where it comes from).

If we learn that some alleged expert's beliefs are more often than not caused by unreliable processes, we are better off looking for other sources of knowledge.

Frankly, I wouldn't really look to any person as a source of knowledge in the way you seem to be implying here.

Here's how knowledge & ... (read more)

The "rules" of science, if they exist, are subject to change at any time.

Here's a rule of science: Your hypothesis must make testable predictions. It must be falsifiable. Is that "subject to change at any time" ? I bet there are more.

While it may not perfectly describe how actual scientists do their work all the time, the scientific method is a description of the process of how we sort out good ideas/models from bad ones, which is the quintessential goal of science (the "advancement of science," if you will).

Just to be clea... (read more)