Interesting. It’s not clear that conspiracy theorists would disagree with scientists about the quality of an argument that touches on neither of their domains. It’s entirely possible that both are able to agree about good and bad arguments for (say) abortion rights, even if they have opposing positions. (E.g., they may well be able to agree that “X is a better argument than Y”, even when one disagrees with both, and the other agrees with both.)
With colleagues at CMU, we've been looking at the ways in which people make arguments. The goal here is to look at what we call "argument making in the wild", i.e., to try to build a taxonomy of the different ways people make arguments, whether or not those methods are good, truth-preserving, consensus-building, etc. This is building off of prior work we've done on explanation-making (a different task, but see https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(20)30228-X for an example of what that might mean).
To be clear, we mean "argument" in the neutral sense where people are "making arguments to each other", not something like "you're just arguing"; we're interested in both "epistemic arguments" (e.g., the argument two... (read 463 more words →)
We've been thinking about explanations in our research (see, e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.07938) and your example of explaining the wrong answer well is lovely.
I dislike these kinds of questions, because they're usually posed at a point well before the wave equations are presented. At this point, you are largely working with verbal explanations and, as you point out, verbal explanations are much harder to pin down.
Mathematically, if A implies B, and you are working to the best of your ability, you can't derive ~B (you may not be able to derive B, of course!) Verbally, this is not so clear; a lot of philosophy is people arguing about whether A implies B or ~B.
If... (read more)