TIP of the day (logic): Acceptable premises

MJ. Smith

In that last post we starting looking at the type of argument most common in our Bible Commentaries - conductive arguments. In conductive arguments you establish the plausibility (cogency) of your position by pulling together unrelated reasons for and against. These reasons are called premises; your position is called the conclusion.

Whether or not the "other side" should accept or reject your premises is the topics of an entire chapter in Tridy Govier's A Practical Student of Argument. However, common sense will take you a long way in deciding to accept or reject a premise.

1. If the premise is the conclusion of a subargument you have already accepted, you should accept it as a premise. Now this subargument doesn't have to actually take place ... you may run it in your own mind rather than forcing the other side to make it explicit as some subarguments are trivial. But you can always request that the side that put a premise forward defend it.

2. The premise is a priori true. "A priori" means that you know it is true independent of experiece. This are often a matter of definition such as "a bachelor has no wife" or "you cannot steal from yourself".

3. The premise is true based on common knowledge. We all have somewhat different reservoirs of "common knowledge" so that what you treat as "common knowledge" in your Sunday School is different from what you treat as "common knowledge" in a debate with an atheist. So I like to think of "common knowledge" as simply what both sides agree on at the outset.

4. There are times when one has to rely on someone's testimony For example, most people mentioned in the book of Acts had to rely on testimony of Paul's experience on the way to Damascus. Barnabas gave such testimony in Jerusalem (Acts 9:26-30). In order to evaluate whether or not such experience should be admitted look at these factors:

• the claim must be plausible in context
• the person giving the testimony should be reliable
• the person giving the testimony must restrict their claim to their experience and competency

There are some religious websites that violate this last principle by being so impressed by a Ph.D. after a person's name, that they forget that the Ph.D. reflects competency in some field not all fields.

5. There are times when one must rely on the word of an authority ... when you don't know something, you must rely on the word of a trusted authority on the subject. Again one needs to consider certain factors before accepting the premise:

• the expert should be reliable
• the expert should be speaking within their area of expertise
• are there alternative premises put forth by other competent experts? if so, does the preponderance of the evidence support the expert?

So, what is one to do in real life when one cannot complete all the research necessary to accept a premise? If a premise seems reasonable to you, you can always accept it provisionally ... which means any conclusion based on it is also just provisionally accepted. If later, you find problems with the consequences of these provisional acceptances, you can always come back and revisit them more closely.

DMB

Just moving your discussion back to the top.  Very apropo to Logos argument for existance.

Yesterday in the NYTimes, was an excellent question ... summarized, when professional investors can barely match a room full of monkeys' investment decisions, why do 60%+ of non-professionals see themselves as expert, and competitive with professionals?

It was a lengthy discussion of the propensity of humans to decide no matter the actual evidence (more often almost none).  There is a major reluctance to step away from the gaming table of guessing.