Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

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Premises are not part of the argument, they're assertions that the argument is based on. The argument is how we get from the premises to the conclusion.

If we don't simply agree on the premises, an argument has to be made to support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further premises. If we don't agree on those premises, an argument has to be made to support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further premises.

Eventually we agree on premises, and work our way back up.

>the pure mechanistic check of the operations/conclusion part that logical fallacies provide is very nearly useless.

I think that it's the only important part of evaluating an argument. So our premises differ. If further arguments that you plan to make rest on the premise that the mechanistic checking of the chain of reasoning from premises to conclusion of an argument is very nearly useless, I may be able to recognize the soundness of this hypothetical argument, but never the validity.

> in a moral issue, the premises depend on your values, not some objectively verifiable external truth.

That I claim to have a moral value is an objectively verifiable external truth.

>On issues of personal interest, the premises depend on what benefits whom. Etc.

When?

>On political issues the nuances and justifications for the premises are so rich that it's not even worth trying...

Isn't the entire political process an act of trying?

> Premises are not part of the argument, they're assertions that the argument is based on

You kind of answer yourself by identifying the fact that premises are often called into question during the course of an argument:

> If we don't simply agree on the premises, an argument has to be made to support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further premises. If we don't agree on those premises, an argument has to be made to support the ones we don't agree on, and that argument will have further premises.

Your parent's argument was that this can go on forever, and never really grounds out, which demonstrates the flaw in the "argumentation is reducible to mechanistic checking" mentality.

I pretty much agree with your parent, because you can see it even when you go all the way to the ground. A lot of evidence cannot get better than statistical, and statisticians sometimes argue about the best way to approach their field. Even for non-statistical arguments, there's some old beef in mathematics about aoc.

But even for most issues where these foundational questions aren't relevant, doing enough work to formalize arguments is intractable.

> That I claim to have a moral value is an objectively verifiable external truth.

That's not very useful when we're trying to make a moral decision and have different competing values. Most political discussions are utilitarian with a mix of various moral imperatives (e.g. optimize well-being, but abide by the constitution's letter and intent).

> Isn't the entire political process an act of trying?

I think he meant it's not worth trying to treat the arguments as chains of reasoning working from a closed set of premises.

Although I agree that the political process in most places could benefit from a bit more logic, it's worth noting that the political process is the act of trying to get power, not trying to reason soundly :-)

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