Comment by nmrm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nmrm | Hacker News Reader

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> One party claims to be right, states its premises, and how those premises lead to their conclusion.

This is a very vague sentence. What does "how those premises lead to their conclusion" mean?

A formal system?

If not a formal system, then I don't think "being right" is at all well-defined in this sentence. This case converges to the comment below on tractability, which I'll reply to shortly.

If you are referring to a formal system, then the rest of your comment actually is correct. But even in mathematics itself, codifying proof in a formal system is quite rare and practiced only by logicians, certain subfields of CS, and a few early adopters. edit: And, far more to the point, most arguments aren't and can't be mathematical in nature.

> Attacking that argument means pointing out flaws in the reasoning or the premises.

> I don't understand how the rest of your comment relates to argumentation.

The problem is that you're assuming arguments cost nothing -- in terms of money or effort -- to produce. But this simply is not the case. Even in the very best-case scenario of mathematics itself, proof search for even relatively trivial theories is incredibly costly (triple exponential). So even for tiny little factoids that are perfectly well-defined, constructing a valid argument can be intractable.

Now consider the more likely situation where the actual truth of the proposition is effectively unknowable (most of economics and politics) or very difficult to know a priori (a lot of modern science). The resources committed to producing argumentation is probably the most important indicator of the quality of arguments.

> It sounds more like a comment on marketing - and while marketing may use different arguments of varying quality, it is not in itself an argument.

Right, well, I claimed that a lot of marketing is argument construction. So yes, there are other aspects to most marketing as well. But argumentation is certainly part of it.

edit: various small mechanical errors, slight rewording of hastily written sentences.

>If you are referring to a formal system, then the rest of your comment actually is correct. But even in mathematics itself, codifying proof in a formal system is quite rare and practiced only by logicians, certain subfields of CS, and a few early adopters. edit: And, far more to the point, most arguments aren't and can't be mathematical in nature.

I disagree with your premise. I believe that all arguments rest of the degree of truth of their premises, and formal methods are used to prove that the degree of truth in the conclusion springs from the degree of truth of the premises. That is definitional - there's nothing else that I would refer to as an argument. Informal fallacies are also formal fallacies, they're just a way of categorizing fallacies that are written in human language rather than mathematical language.

>The problem is that you're assuming arguments cost nothing -- in terms of money or effort -- to produce.

No, I'm not.

>Right, well, I claimed that a lot of marketing is argument construction. So yes, there are other aspects to most marketing as well. But argumentation is certainly part of it.

I'm only interested within this thread about the portion of marketing that is argument construction and analysis, and not in conflating argumentation with rhetoric, marketing, or propaganda. This is not to deny that those fields do use argumentation, along with the sciences, history, literature, theology, and all other fields.

> I disagree with your premise. I believe that all arguments rest of the degree of truth of their premises

I categorically wasn't referring to the choice of premises, but rather to the cost of finding and evaluating valid arguments themselves, even once premises are settled, for pretty much any interesting/realistic set of premises. That is, in your words, "how those premises lead to their conclusion"

The cost of finding a valid argument, or even deciding rather a prop is true without producing a witnessing argument, is more often than not intractable.

> No, I'm not [assuming arguments cost nothing -- in terms of money or effort -- to produce]

> I'm only interested within this thread about the portion of marketing that is argument construction and analysis, and not in conflating argumentation with rhetoric, marketing, or propaganda.

I assert these two statements are in direct contradiction, since I've provided several examples in this thread of how even and especially appeals to valid argumentation can be used as a form of rhetorical manipulation or propaganda.

Arguments, formal or informal, are costly to produce and even sometimes costly to evaluate.

People with vested interests can and do produce higher-quality arguments than those who don't have the means or simply don't care. Or people who want no action to happen can bog down the conversation. Or people who want something to happen can throw more resources at research and argument construction than their opponents for finite time, and win out.

And all of this even if we assume that every prop has a truth value and that finding that truth value is even decidable, which definitely is not the case.

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