I think what applies to everyday reasoning is that an argument is usually an informal suggestion pointing at a single component out of, often, a very huge sum, or, in other cases, a proposition reliant on a very large number of implicit assumptions and/or very prone to being destroyed “from the outside” by expert knowledge.
If the term from the sum was picked at random, it would have to be regressed towards the mean when you estimate expected value of the sum; when the term is not picked at random, and you don’t know to which extent it’s choice is correlated with it’s value, you can’t really use it in any way to meaningfully improve an estimate of the sum (even though the authority and non-authority alike will demand that you add in their argument somehow, and will not suggest you treat it as an estimation of the totality of the arguments).
I think what applies to everyday reasoning is that an argument is usually an informal suggestion pointing at a single component out of, often, a very huge sum, or, in other cases, a proposition reliant on a very large number of implicit assumptions and/or very prone to being destroyed “from the outside” by expert knowledge.
If the term from the sum was picked at random, it would have to be regressed towards the mean when you estimate expected value of the sum; when the term is not picked at random, and you don’t know to which extent it’s choice is correlated with it’s value, you can’t really use it in any way to meaningfully improve an estimate of the sum (even though the authority and non-authority alike will demand that you add in their argument somehow, and will not suggest you treat it as an estimation of the totality of the arguments).