My point is that “If you can’t add, how can you average?” is not a valid argument, even though in this particular case both the premise and the conclusion happen to be correct.
My point is that “If you can’t add, how can you average?” is not a valid argument, even though in this particular case both the premise and the conclusion happen to be correct.
If I ask “If you can’t add, how can you average?” and TimFreeman responds with “by using utilities that live in affine spaces,” I then respond with “great, those utilities are useless for doing what you want to do.” When a rhetorical question has an answer, the answer needs to be material to invalidate its rhetorical function; where’s the invalidity?
I took the rhetorical question to implicitly be the syllogism ‘you can’t sum different people’s utilities, you can’t average what you can’ t sum, therefore you can’ average different people’s utilities’. I just pointed out that the second premise isn’t generally true. (Both the first premise and the conclusion are true, which is why it’s a nitpick.) Did I over-interpret the rhetorical question?
The direction I took the rhetorical question was “utilities aren’t numbers, they’re mappings,” which does not require the second premise. I agree with you that the syllogism you presented is flawed.
My point is that “If you can’t add, how can you average?” is not a valid argument, even though in this particular case both the premise and the conclusion happen to be correct.
If I ask “If you can’t add, how can you average?” and TimFreeman responds with “by using utilities that live in affine spaces,” I then respond with “great, those utilities are useless for doing what you want to do.” When a rhetorical question has an answer, the answer needs to be material to invalidate its rhetorical function; where’s the invalidity?
I took the rhetorical question to implicitly be the syllogism ‘you can’t sum different people’s utilities, you can’t average what you can’ t sum, therefore you can’ average different people’s utilities’. I just pointed out that the second premise isn’t generally true. (Both the first premise and the conclusion are true, which is why it’s a nitpick.) Did I over-interpret the rhetorical question?
The direction I took the rhetorical question was “utilities aren’t numbers, they’re mappings,” which does not require the second premise. I agree with you that the syllogism you presented is flawed.