What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
-- Christopher Hitchens
Accuracy was sacrificed for a pleasant parallel construction. Anything can be so asserted.
And, without supporting evidence, such assertions demonstrate nothing.
The mere fact that an assertion has been made is, in fact, evidence. For example, I will now flip a coin five times, and assert that the outcome was THHTT. I will not provide any evidence other than that assertion, but that is sufficient to conclude that your estimate of the probability that it’s true should be higher than 1/2^5. Most assertions don’t come with evidence provided unless you go looking for it. If nothing else, most assertions have to be unsupported because they’re evidence for other things and the process has to bottom out somewhere.
Now, as a matter of policy we should encourage people to provide more evidence for their assertions wherever possible, but that is entirely separate from the questions of what is evidence, what evidence is needed, and what is demonstrated by an assertion having been made.
The mere fact that an assertion has been made is, in fact, evidence.
Well the evidence here isn’t really “the fact that it has been asserted” but “the fact that it has been asserted in a context where truthfulness and authority are usually assumed”. The assertion itself doesn’t carry the weight. If we’re playing poker and in the middle of a big hand I tell you “I have the best hand possible, you should fold.” that isn’t evidence of anything since it has been asserted in a context where assumptions about truthfulness have been flung out the window.
that is sufficient to conclude that your estimate of the probability that it’s true should be higher than 1/2^5.
Or it’s sufficient to conclude that one’s estimate should be less than 1/2^5. Without providing additional evidence (such as “I saw the THHTT outcome”) your claim is rather dubious and—in the realm of humans—this probably is a good indicator that you are lying or are crazy. I’m not sure how one should update your posteriors.
Suppose I tell you that my password is D!h98+3(dkE4. Do you conclude that since I don’t want you to know my password, I must be trying to mislead you as to what my password is, and so the probability that this is my password is actually less than 1/95^12?
If I assert that the outcome as THHTT, either I’m lying or I’m not lying, and there’s little evidence either way. What little evidence there is probably doesn’t push my probability of telling the truth below 3%, and surely the strength of the evidence has little, if anything, to do with the prior probability of the coin showing THHTT.
Do you conclude that since I don’t want you to know my password, I must be trying to mislead you as to what my password is, and so the probability that this is my password is actually less than 1/95^12?
Good point. Thanks for batting down my idiocy here, much obliged =D
Tom and Sue, acquaintances through friends of theirs, got legally married, with no ceremony, in order for Tom to avoid being drafted to fight in a war. They barely know each other. They have not spoken to each other in a long time and (obviously) have no children. Neither wears a wedding ring. They plan to void the marriage as soon as the laws allow, with no further transfer of property between them.
Tom is a married bachelor.
There’s a reason the term “bachelor” exists, and it’s not to make Kant right.
This just looks like an instance of using contradictory language to indicate that Tom fits the the conventional definitions of neither a bachelor or a married man. You could also say Tom is a single spouse. Bachelor happens to have connotations of referring to lifestyle rather than legal status which makes your meaning plainer. The fact that language is flexible enough to get around logic doesn’t mean married bachelor isn’t a logical contradiction or that Kant is wrong.
My point is that we have words because they call out a useful, albeit fuzzy, blob of conceptspace. We may try to claim that two words mean the same thing, but if there are different words, there’s probably a reason—because we want to reference different concepts (“connotations”) in someone’s mind.
It’s important to distinguish between the concepts we are trying to reference, vs. some objective equivalence we think exists in the territory. The territory actually includes minds that think different thoughts on hearing “unmarried” vs. “bachelor”.
ETA: My point regarding Kant was this: He should have seen statements like “All bachelors are unmarried” as evidence regarding how humans decide to use words, not as evidence for the existence of certain categories in reality’s most fundamental ontology.
My point regarding Kant was this: He should have seen statements like “All bachelors are unmarried” as evidence regarding how humans decide to use words, not as evidence for the existence of certain categories in reality’s most fundamental ontology.
By “certain categories in reality’s most fundamental ontology”, do you mean the synthetic/analytic distinction? He wouldn’t consider that distinction to be part of reality’s most fundamental ontology. He would disavow any ability to get at “fundamental reality”, which he would consider to be intrinsically out of reach, locked away in the inaccessible numinous.
Actually, he would say something very close to what you wrote when you said that he “should have seen statements like ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ as evidence regarding how humans decide to use words”. What he would say is that the statement is evidence regarding how humans have decided to build a certain concept out of other concepts.
If you affirm the assertion “All bachelors are unmarried” to yourself, then what you are doing, on Kant’s view, is inspecting the concept “bachelor” in your own mind and finding the concept “unmarried” to be among its building blocks. The assertion is analytic because one confirms it to oneself in this way.
Analyticity doesn’t have to do with what the things you call bachelors are like in and of themselves. So it’s not about fundamental reality. Rather, analysis is the act of inspecting how a concept is put together in your mind, and analytic assertions are just assertions that analysis can justify, such as that one concept is part of another concept.
Kant would even allow that you could make a mistake while carrying out this inspection. You might think that “unmarried” was one of the original pieces out of which you had built “bachelor”, when in fact you just now snuck in “unmarried” to form some new concept without realizing it. That is, you might have just unknowingly carried out an act of synthesis. Kant would say, though, that you can reach effective certainty if you are sufficiently careful, just as you can reach effective certainty about a simple arithmetical sum if you perform the sum with sufficient care.
[The above is just to clarify Kant’s claims, not to endorse them.]
This is just playing with connotations. A bachelor is an unmarried man, so one could say that Tom acts like a bachelor despite being married. He is not a bachelor, though. To show this has a practical implication, assume Tom met Mary: the two could not get married immediately. If he were a bachelor, they could. He therefore lacks necessary properties of bachelorness (most significantly, not being married), and cannot be a bachelor, even if he may live his life much as a bachelor would.
I was wrong. On further reflection, this is a failed attempt to refute this point, though I don’t think the ensuing discussion of Kant actually gets to why.
If you’re familiar with the definition of bachelor, then this statement equates to, “There are no unmarried married men.” Any statement of the form “No A are not-A” is completely uninformative. As it can be decided a priori for any consistent value of A, stating it demonstrates nothing.
If you aren’t clear on the meaning of bachelor, then this statement would require a citation of the definition in order to be convincing. This would constitute supporting evidence, and it would serve to demonstrate the meaning of “bachelor.”
Thus, this does not go to refute the claim that an assertion without supporting evidence demonstrates nothing, as that is clearly the case here.
And, without supporting evidence, such assertions demonstrate nothing.
The mere fact that an assertion has been made is, in fact, evidence. For example, I will now flip a coin five times, and assert that the outcome was THHTT. I will not provide any evidence other than that assertion, but that is sufficient to conclude that your estimate of the probability that it’s true should be higher than 1/2^5. Most assertions don’t come with evidence provided unless you go looking for it. If nothing else, most assertions have to be unsupported because they’re evidence for other things and the process has to bottom out somewhere.
Now, as a matter of policy we should encourage people to provide more evidence for their assertions wherever possible, but that is entirely separate from the questions of what is evidence, what evidence is needed, and what is demonstrated by an assertion having been made.
Well the evidence here isn’t really “the fact that it has been asserted” but “the fact that it has been asserted in a context where truthfulness and authority are usually assumed”. The assertion itself doesn’t carry the weight. If we’re playing poker and in the middle of a big hand I tell you “I have the best hand possible, you should fold.” that isn’t evidence of anything since it has been asserted in a context where assumptions about truthfulness have been flung out the window.
Or it’s sufficient to conclude that one’s estimate should be less than 1/2^5. Without providing additional evidence (such as “I saw the THHTT outcome”) your claim is rather dubious and—in the realm of humans—this probably is a good indicator that you are lying or are crazy. I’m not sure how one should update your posteriors.
Suppose I tell you that my password is D!h98+3(dkE4. Do you conclude that since I don’t want you to know my password, I must be trying to mislead you as to what my password is, and so the probability that this is my password is actually less than 1/95^12?
If I assert that the outcome as THHTT, either I’m lying or I’m not lying, and there’s little evidence either way. What little evidence there is probably doesn’t push my probability of telling the truth below 3%, and surely the strength of the evidence has little, if anything, to do with the prior probability of the coin showing THHTT.
Good point. Thanks for batting down my idiocy here, much obliged =D
“There are no married bachelors.”
Tom and Sue, acquaintances through friends of theirs, got legally married, with no ceremony, in order for Tom to avoid being drafted to fight in a war. They barely know each other. They have not spoken to each other in a long time and (obviously) have no children. Neither wears a wedding ring. They plan to void the marriage as soon as the laws allow, with no further transfer of property between them.
Tom is a married bachelor.
There’s a reason the term “bachelor” exists, and it’s not to make Kant right.
This just looks like an instance of using contradictory language to indicate that Tom fits the the conventional definitions of neither a bachelor or a married man. You could also say Tom is a single spouse. Bachelor happens to have connotations of referring to lifestyle rather than legal status which makes your meaning plainer. The fact that language is flexible enough to get around logic doesn’t mean married bachelor isn’t a logical contradiction or that Kant is wrong.
My point is that we have words because they call out a useful, albeit fuzzy, blob of conceptspace. We may try to claim that two words mean the same thing, but if there are different words, there’s probably a reason—because we want to reference different concepts (“connotations”) in someone’s mind.
It’s important to distinguish between the concepts we are trying to reference, vs. some objective equivalence we think exists in the territory. The territory actually includes minds that think different thoughts on hearing “unmarried” vs. “bachelor”.
ETA: My point regarding Kant was this: He should have seen statements like “All bachelors are unmarried” as evidence regarding how humans decide to use words, not as evidence for the existence of certain categories in reality’s most fundamental ontology.
By “certain categories in reality’s most fundamental ontology”, do you mean the synthetic/analytic distinction? He wouldn’t consider that distinction to be part of reality’s most fundamental ontology. He would disavow any ability to get at “fundamental reality”, which he would consider to be intrinsically out of reach, locked away in the inaccessible numinous.
Actually, he would say something very close to what you wrote when you said that he “should have seen statements like ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ as evidence regarding how humans decide to use words”. What he would say is that the statement is evidence regarding how humans have decided to build a certain concept out of other concepts.
If you affirm the assertion “All bachelors are unmarried” to yourself, then what you are doing, on Kant’s view, is inspecting the concept “bachelor” in your own mind and finding the concept “unmarried” to be among its building blocks. The assertion is analytic because one confirms it to oneself in this way.
Analyticity doesn’t have to do with what the things you call bachelors are like in and of themselves. So it’s not about fundamental reality. Rather, analysis is the act of inspecting how a concept is put together in your mind, and analytic assertions are just assertions that analysis can justify, such as that one concept is part of another concept.
Kant would even allow that you could make a mistake while carrying out this inspection. You might think that “unmarried” was one of the original pieces out of which you had built “bachelor”, when in fact you just now snuck in “unmarried” to form some new concept without realizing it. That is, you might have just unknowingly carried out an act of synthesis. Kant would say, though, that you can reach effective certainty if you are sufficiently careful, just as you can reach effective certainty about a simple arithmetical sum if you perform the sum with sufficient care.
[The above is just to clarify Kant’s claims, not to endorse them.]
I don’t disagree with anything here.
Rockin’.
I’d tie the point back to the original quotation, but I’m losing interest now and actually kind of busy...
This is just playing with connotations. A bachelor is an unmarried man, so one could say that Tom acts like a bachelor despite being married. He is not a bachelor, though. To show this has a practical implication, assume Tom met Mary: the two could not get married immediately. If he were a bachelor, they could. He therefore lacks necessary properties of bachelorness (most significantly, not being married), and cannot be a bachelor, even if he may live his life much as a bachelor would.
My dad has a Bachelor’s degree.
Is he married?
Yes, to mom.
“There are no married unmarried men.”
I add this grudgingly, as deliberately seeking ambiguity in a clear sentence is just being fatuous; it’s not a valid objection.
.
I was wrong. On further reflection, this is a failed attempt to refute this point, though I don’t think the ensuing discussion of Kant actually gets to why.
If you’re familiar with the definition of bachelor, then this statement equates to, “There are no unmarried married men.” Any statement of the form “No A are not-A” is completely uninformative. As it can be decided a priori for any consistent value of A, stating it demonstrates nothing.
If you aren’t clear on the meaning of bachelor, then this statement would require a citation of the definition in order to be convincing. This would constitute supporting evidence, and it would serve to demonstrate the meaning of “bachelor.”
Thus, this does not go to refute the claim that an assertion without supporting evidence demonstrates nothing, as that is clearly the case here.