Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
What I found fascinating about it was the epistemological premise underlying it all. First of all, he assumes, as many of us do, that we will be able to tell if X, Y or Z is "torture" if we experience it - sort of like the "I don't know art but I know what I like [and if I like it, it's "Art"]" model (i.e. Truth by personal experience). Now this is a completely different epistemological ground from the more common ideological one - e.g. "If X says it, it must be right" (truth by assertion).

When we look at the valorization of the Press as a "watchdog", that Truth via experience model implicitly underlies our expectations.
MarcT,

I won't comment on all of the problems in the logical presentations of the stylized arguments in your post (the stuff I deleted from the above quotation). I'm more concerned with the last point anyway. I think the "Press as Watchdog" model of truth is an epistemological stance that accords validity based on position rather than on experience. It is subject to the informal fallacy of "appeal to (illegitimate) authority" (and I'm not talking about the marital status of the authority's parents ). Too often folks get snookered by "authorities" who either aren't experts or are operating well outside the scope of their expertise (Noam Chomsky being one of my favorite examples, but most of the CNN and Fox News military analysts have been known to overstep their "scope of practice" as well).

What Hitchens may really have been up to was a corrective belief experience, a form of a posteriori testing of his beliefs about waterboarding. That does not "prove" that waterboarding is torture. A mismatch exists between being able to test whether a physical manifestation of a characteristic of a concept actually instantiates that characteristic (a rather subjective and at best, interpersonal activity) and being able to determining whether the a priori list of characteristics one has for "defining " a concept adequately defines that concept (again subjective and probably interpersonal due to the use of the normative term 'adequately'). What Hitchens did was decide that waterboarding was an instance of the concept 'torture' but he did not explain what about waterboarding had the conditions necessary to hang the name 'torture' on the action. (To use terms of art, he showed that an act of waterboarding was in his extension for torture, not that it was in anyone's intension for the term.) To summarize, he found that waterboarding scared the crap out of him, but he didn't demostrate that having the crap scared out of you is a form of torture. (BTW, if being scared to death were a form of torture, then Bram Stoker tortured me with his book Dracula.)