I provided an argument. On the specific point you cited. Appeals to authority are not the only kind of argument, and further I pointed out the problems with the authorities you use and how this relates to the specific case of Christians-
And, again, you treat my argument as if I am ruling out non-members defining members in general. You ignored points about why this specific case is a specific case. And I have mentioned other special cases with similar problems.
A general argument and one I have not made. I made a specific set of arguments about a specific case, Christianity. Your judgment would have some meat if you actually addressed the points I made. Perhaps you have done it elsewhere, but here you are making a poor argument. Since we in general do this and it works in many instances, it must work in all instances where we define who is a member of set X. This a weak argument and allows you not to address the specific issue at hand or the arguments I made.
And note the logically false argument.
I am saying that doing this is a problem in the case of Y.
You respond that it works in the case of X.
Your argument makes sense if my argument was 'in no case can people who are not X, decide who is a member of group X. Then showing a counterexample is a good argument.
But I have never said that in all cases, when one is not a member of group X, one cannot determine the members of group X. I clearly and obviously made a case that the specific qualities of this group X and what this entails about the criteria involved and determining what criteria are involved entails my conclusion.
And there is an extra irony in that you chose an example where you specifically have reasons to believe in the authorities. You believe in the scientific epistemology. You believe in their expertise. You believe in the objects of their learnedness. Any body evaluating who is a scientist would be best to include scientists. You, Prismatic, have good grounds to think they are experts, since you believe in science, so you, as a specific human, appealing to their authority, makes sense. So not only, by using scientists as a counterexample, arguing against an argument I never made (the general one) but you have chosen a counterexample that is not relevent in any way to the case I made.
Further, Case X Christians has to do with religion where we are talking about beliefs, attitudes and a lot of internal states - that is where the problem of other minds plays a key role. That the authorities disagree about a lot of important issues in other areas, have changed their minds over time about a lot of important issues, have vested interests in the criteria, have justified evil acts and then changed their minds, often about those, and work with ‘evidence’ that itself is inconsistant, makes your appeals to authority problematic. There were other arguments I made in my previous post. And nothing you said in this last post is even relevent to any of those arguments.
My experience is, Prismatic, that once you have decided on a position, nothing can change your mind. It has to be the case. So I will openly say I do not read all your responses. I have focused more on Fanman’s posts here, though this obviously meant I was responding to your arguments and points, in the context of his discussion with you.
I hope you will notice here how your response to my argument, in its last formulationn, was a very poor one, since it treated my argument as a general one rather than a specific one, and the only possible reason to do this is to avoid dealing with the specific qualities of the Christian one and so my argument got framed as saying ‘non-members of a group can never define who members are.’ An argument I never made. I do not believe that holds at the general level. So before just finding new arguments, notice that you grabbed for an irrelevant one, and consider that this might indicate how open minded you actually are about this issue.