The link in Carter’s statement leads to a page that clearly contradicts Carter’s claim:
In logic, appeal to consequences refers only to arguments that assert a conclusion’s truth value (true or false) without regard to the formal preservation of the truth from the premises; appeal to consequences does not refer to arguments that address a premise’s consequential desirability (good or bad, or right or wrong) instead of its truth value.
It sounds to me like Jessica is using “appeal to consequences” expansively to include not just “X has bad consequences so you should not believe X” to “saying X has bad consequences so you should not say X”?
Yes. In practice, if people are discouraged from saying X on the basis that it might be bad to say it, then the discourse goes on believing not-X. So, the discourse itself makes an invalid step that’s analogous to an appeal to consequences “if it’s bad for us to think X is true then it’s false”.
Be careful with unstated assumptions about belief aggregation. “the discourse” doesn’t have beliefs. People have beliefs, and discourse is one of the mechanisms for sharing and aligning those beliefs. It helps a lot to give names to people you’re worried about, to make it super-clear whether you’re talking about your beliefs, your current conversational partner’s beliefs, or beliefs of other people who hear a summary from one of you.
If Alice discourages Bob from saying X, then Charlie might go on believing not-X. This is a very different concern from Bob being worried about believing a false not-X if not allowed to discuss the possibility. Both concerns are valid, IMO, but they have different thresholds of importance and different trade-offs to make in resolution..
In a math conversation, people are going to say and possibly write down a bunch of beliefs, and make arguments that some beliefs follow from each other. The conversation itself could be represented as a transcript of beliefs and arguments. The beliefs in this transcript are what I mean by “the discourse’s beliefs”.
The link in Carter’s statement leads to a page that clearly contradicts Carter’s claim:
It sounds to me like Jessica is using “appeal to consequences” expansively to include not just “X has bad consequences so you should not believe X” to “saying X has bad consequences so you should not say X”?
Yes. In practice, if people are discouraged from saying X on the basis that it might be bad to say it, then the discourse goes on believing not-X. So, the discourse itself makes an invalid step that’s analogous to an appeal to consequences “if it’s bad for us to think X is true then it’s false”.
Be careful with unstated assumptions about belief aggregation. “the discourse” doesn’t have beliefs. People have beliefs, and discourse is one of the mechanisms for sharing and aligning those beliefs. It helps a lot to give names to people you’re worried about, to make it super-clear whether you’re talking about your beliefs, your current conversational partner’s beliefs, or beliefs of other people who hear a summary from one of you.
If Alice discourages Bob from saying X, then Charlie might go on believing not-X. This is a very different concern from Bob being worried about believing a false not-X if not allowed to discuss the possibility. Both concerns are valid, IMO, but they have different thresholds of importance and different trade-offs to make in resolution..
In a math conversation, people are going to say and possibly write down a bunch of beliefs, and make arguments that some beliefs follow from each other. The conversation itself could be represented as a transcript of beliefs and arguments. The beliefs in this transcript are what I mean by “the discourse’s beliefs”.