[Cross-post with Oystein (and I haven't even caught up on the prior discussion)]Heretic76 wrote:But I wonder if it is also a well known reasoning error to accept at face value the statements of a person or entity notorious for its mendacity?
It's called 'gullibility'. So ubiquitous as to escape categorization in the logical arena. A sucker born every minute.
We are not in a court of law here, we are in the court of public opinion, and dare I say that the public perception, and thus the public opinion, is constantly being manipulated by those who inform us?
Good point. The more the subject veers into unprovable territory, the more a confidence measure relies on probabilistic methods. Once bitten, twice shy.
When numerous members of the 911 Commission have commented in public about the huge shortcomings in the way the commission was run, and the untruthful statements of the DoD, might any conclusions be drawn?
One is that government and its machinations cannot be relied upon to remain objective and virtuous in all circumstances, particularly when it involves investigation which may reveal its own shortcomings and/or malfeasance. Fox guarding the henhouse.
(Aside: See how well reasoning by adage works? You won't find that on Wikipedia, either...)
And I'm quite sure that by the Rules of Logic, that if a thesis is advanced, and that thesis contains multiple parts making up the whole, if any one of those parts is proved invalid, the entire thesis fails.
Ah, you should've quit while you were ahead, with the adage-based reasoning. Seriously, you make a good point in the statements above, really important and germane to this topic.
When the subject at hand is one which involves social mechanics, it is not directly amenable to logical or scientific analysis as applied to passive eventing in the physical world. Proofs are rare, Occam's razor doesn't necessarily apply, data is lacking in both quantity and known provenance. Parsimony and formal logic lose their immediate value in this sort of domain. This is the domain of criminal forensics, where fact must be differentiated from mere observation. Formal logic cares not for the truth values of its premises, but that's all forensics cares about.
In the realm of criminal forensics, it is not always a given that there even is a crime. Forensics meaningfully applies abductive logic, intuition, hunches, whatever. It doesn't matter how you get to a solution so long as you get one and can demonstrate high confidence that it is correct. Along the way, you may very well violate formal reasoning precepts in much the same manner the physical universe borrows against its own energy-time product uncertainty to create virtual particles, which can then go on to exert real effect before disappearing into the aethers. The detective acts on an unscientific hunch, paring away those things considered improbable, conducts a clandestine search without warrant, learns enough to to ask legitimately for a warrant, arrests the bad guy.
It ain't pretty, but it works - a lot.
In summation, I think Heretic76 is functioning as a counterpoint to the more strict logical mannerisms expressed by Oystein and SnowCrash, and that is indeed a valuable function in what is largely a touchy feely subject. Issues of evidence to which none of us are privy to directly is a pretty substantial impediment to further discovery. While I think Oystein has admirably stated a case for high confidence in the accepted story, one cannot dismiss the reasons for suspicion - only the degree of suspicion - based solely on this approach. I personally feel it takes the result to very high confidence, but the
reasons for suspicion (I emphasize reason in distinction to the suspicioon itself) are equally unassailable.
My gut weighs in favor of the high confidence scenario, that it trumps well-founded suspicion in this particular case.
