I feel like this really misses the point of the whole “non-central fallacy” idea. I would say, categories are heuristics and those heuristics have limits. When the category gets strained, the thing to do is to stop arguing using the category and start arguing the particular facts without relation to the category (“taboo your words”).
You’re saying that this sort of arguing-via-category is useful because it’s actually aguing-via-similarity; but I see the point of Scott/Yvain’s original article being that such arguing via similarity simply isn’t useful in such cases, and has to be replaced with a direct assessment of the facts.
Like, one might say, similar in what way, and how do we know that this particular similarity is relevant in this case? But any answer to why the similarity is relevant, could be translated into an argument that doesn’t rely on the similarity in the first place. Similarity can thus be a useful guide to finding arguments, but it shouldn’t, in contentious cases, be considered compelling as an argument itself.
Yes, as you say, the argument is common because it is useful as a quick shorthand most of the time. But in contentious cases, in edge cases—the cases that people are likely to be arguing about—it breaks down. That is to say, it’s an argument whose validity is largel to those cases where people aren’t arguing to begin with!
I feel like this really misses the point of the whole “non-central fallacy” idea. I would say, categories are heuristics and those heuristics have limits. When the category gets strained, the thing to do is to stop arguing using the category and start arguing the particular facts without relation to the category (“taboo your words”).
You’re saying that this sort of arguing-via-category is useful because it’s actually aguing-via-similarity; but I see the point of Scott/Yvain’s original article being that such arguing via similarity simply isn’t useful in such cases, and has to be replaced with a direct assessment of the facts.
Like, one might say, similar in what way, and how do we know that this particular similarity is relevant in this case? But any answer to why the similarity is relevant, could be translated into an argument that doesn’t rely on the similarity in the first place. Similarity can thus be a useful guide to finding arguments, but it shouldn’t, in contentious cases, be considered compelling as an argument itself.
Yes, as you say, the argument is common because it is useful as a quick shorthand most of the time. But in contentious cases, in edge cases—the cases that people are likely to be arguing about—it breaks down. That is to say, it’s an argument whose validity is largel to those cases where people aren’t arguing to begin with!