When someone posts links from webpage X, which can be refuted from webpage Y (or vice versa), and so on, without adding anything themselves to the discussion.
Motivating example:
I’ve often seen things posted on climate change, lifted directly from http://wattsupwiththat.com/ , that can be refuted from http://www.skepticalscience.com/ , which can often be re-refuted from the original website, and so on. Since we’re just letting the websites talk to each other, and neither poster has any relevant expertise, this seems a pointless waste.
An argument that halts in disagreement (or fails to halt in agreement) because the interlocutors are each waiting for another to provide a skillful assessment of their own inexpertly-referenced media sounds a lot like a software process deadlock condition in computer science. Maybe there’s a more specific type of deadlock, livelock, resource starvation, …, in the semantic neighborhood of your identified pattern.
Dropping references, while failing to disclaim your ability to evaluate the quality and relevance of topical media, could be called a violation of pragmatic expectations of rational discourse, like Grice’s prescriptive maxims.
Maybe a telecommunications analogy would work, making reference to amplifiers \ repeaters \ broadcast stations that degrade a received signal if they fail to filter \ shape it to the characteristics of the retransmission channel.
“Rhetorical reenactment” sounds like “historical reenactment” and hints at the unproductive, not-directly-participatory role in the debate of the people sharing links.
I’m not sure whether to start a new comment thread on this, but a related phenomenon:
Blog A has a post about some subject. Blog B has a post that is mostly just recapitulating the points of Blog A, and links to Blog A. Blog C has a post also on the subject, and rather than linking to Blog A, links to Blog B. Blog D then comes along and links to Blog C, and so on, and so rather than a bunch of blog posts all linking to the original post, you have a chain of blogs citing blogs citing blogs citing blogs. (This sort of phenomenon shows up a lot of times when Snopes tries to research something, although often it’s print media citing each other). I’m reminded of the phrase “it’s turtles all the way down”, and think of this as “turtle citing”, although perhaps a more descriptive phrase would be “recursive citation”.
Another related phenomenon is people using anchor text for their links that really doesn’t reflect the actual link content.
This happens when the debaters’ personal level of knowledge and expertise has been exceeded by external sources introduced to the debate. Essentially, then, each person is using an appeal to authority with different ideas of what level of authority their sources have, since it well beyond their abilities to verify their sources’ arguments. Terms like Epistemic Closure in political contexts address the related phenomena of conflicting but self-consistent networks of authoritative sources.
I’d call the underlying issue an “Epistemic Divide”
General case:
When someone posts links from webpage X, which can be refuted from webpage Y (or vice versa), and so on, without adding anything themselves to the discussion.
Motivating example:
I’ve often seen things posted on climate change, lifted directly from http://wattsupwiththat.com/ , that can be refuted from http://www.skepticalscience.com/ , which can often be re-refuted from the original website, and so on. Since we’re just letting the websites talk to each other, and neither poster has any relevant expertise, this seems a pointless waste.
An argument that halts in disagreement (or fails to halt in agreement) because the interlocutors are each waiting for another to provide a skillful assessment of their own inexpertly-referenced media sounds a lot like a software process deadlock condition in computer science. Maybe there’s a more specific type of deadlock, livelock, resource starvation, …, in the semantic neighborhood of your identified pattern.
Dropping references, while failing to disclaim your ability to evaluate the quality and relevance of topical media, could be called a violation of pragmatic expectations of rational discourse, like Grice’s prescriptive maxims.
Maybe a telecommunications analogy would work, making reference to amplifiers \ repeaters \ broadcast stations that degrade a received signal if they fail to filter \ shape it to the characteristics of the retransmission channel.
“Rhetorical reenactment” sounds like “historical reenactment” and hints at the unproductive, not-directly-participatory role in the debate of the people sharing links.
I’m not sure whether to start a new comment thread on this, but a related phenomenon:
Blog A has a post about some subject. Blog B has a post that is mostly just recapitulating the points of Blog A, and links to Blog A. Blog C has a post also on the subject, and rather than linking to Blog A, links to Blog B. Blog D then comes along and links to Blog C, and so on, and so rather than a bunch of blog posts all linking to the original post, you have a chain of blogs citing blogs citing blogs citing blogs. (This sort of phenomenon shows up a lot of times when Snopes tries to research something, although often it’s print media citing each other). I’m reminded of the phrase “it’s turtles all the way down”, and think of this as “turtle citing”, although perhaps a more descriptive phrase would be “recursive citation”.
Another related phenomenon is people using anchor text for their links that really doesn’t reflect the actual link content.
/u/Morendil calls this ‘leprechauns’; in a Wikipedia context, one might use ‘citogenesis’. I run into this occasionally—most recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bicycle_face#Serious_sourcing_issues
This happens when the debaters’ personal level of knowledge and expertise has been exceeded by external sources introduced to the debate. Essentially, then, each person is using an appeal to authority with different ideas of what level of authority their sources have, since it well beyond their abilities to verify their sources’ arguments. Terms like Epistemic Closure in political contexts address the related phenomena of conflicting but self-consistent networks of authoritative sources.
I’d call the underlying issue an “Epistemic Divide”