Change in media reporting

[marct]

Hi WM,

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).

One of these days, we have to sit down and do a comparison between formal logic and semantic or emotional logic - preferably combined with a series of optics experiments .

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 ).

It's a matter of stance, really. The assumption o the part of the audience is that the reporter is an "authority", as you noted (or, at least, that they have done their homework). But this hides another assumption which is that the reporter has an experiential grounding in the area of, at a minimum, the "ask the man who knows" type.

Actually, this type of stance based authority is standard in any type of culture more complex than a simple Hunter-Gatherer group (cf Durkheim's Introduction to he 2nd edition of The Division of Labor in Society).

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).

Agreed; happens all the time.

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.)

Actually, I don't disagree with you at all. As far as formal logic is concerned, and especially that based on crisp sets, his "experiment" is junk. The crucial point, and the reason why I tossed it up in his thread, was his use of an experimental / experiential test as a way to reinforce his "authority". Did it "prove" that waterboarding was "torture"? Not in any hypothetically objective sense. Then again, "torture" is not a thing that can be perceived as objectively existing in reality (for an analog, see all the problems with defining "abuse"). "Torture" (and "abuse") are socially constructed and negotiated conceptual constructs that have no objective and absolute existence (i.e. they are not crisp sets or objects existing outside of a socially constructed context).

What I was noting that Hitchens was doing was invoking a particular epistemological stance (or ploy, take your pick ) in an ongoing debate.