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Comment by cldr | Hacker News Reader

> That's a matter of opinion

Well, whether or not an argument is sound (is never|shouldn't be) a matter of opinion. Soundness has nothing to do with whether the premises are true or not, it just means that if the premises are true, the conclusions necessarily follow. Whether the argument is _valid_ or not is a different matter.

I'm not commenting on the article or anything, I just thought I'd point that out.

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All legal rulings are merely the opinions of fallible people. Some of those fallible people are more authoritarian, some are more libertarian.

"The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -George Orwell, 1948

I'm not saying anything about the ruling, just the general properties of arguments. An argument such as "The moon is made of cheddar cheese, and cheddar cheese is yellow, therefore the moon is yellow" is perfectly sound, invalid though it may be.

You had mentioned "If one is in favor of government power over the Constitutional rights of individual citizens, then I guess it makes some kind of sense". That has to do with whether the argument is valid, not whether it is sound. That was the object of my comment.

In this case, it's definitely a matter of opinion. rayiner's comment assumes that there's a fundamental difference between "making law" and "interpreting the government's powers under existing law", and that because the FISA court's decision fall under the latter category there's no public interest in knowing how they've interpreted the law - even if those interpretations would shock someone who only knows the letter of the law.

I'll see your point but raise you: the absolute soundness of an argument is distinct from our ability to determine that soundness.

This isn't just a technical incompleteness argument; the law is not written using a propositional calculus, but rather an imprecise semantic encoding (which we might refer to as "Legal English") that is subject to multiple interpretations.

So in the case of law it is possible/likely/inevitable that the argument is, by the use of natural language, itself ambiguous, so the soundness thereof is a vector state.

Or to put it in simpler terms: it is all a matter of opinion.

We can say that reality is a matter of opinion but we can't have that much useful discourse that way :) And in my comment I meant to refer to his statement "if you are in favor of..." which, even if soundness is subjective, doesn't have to do with soundness at all.

Thanks for the clarification. It had rather sounded like you were trying to apply the rules of logic to human law, which is of course like trying to urinate in a hurricane.

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