In the first part you add a parameter. One person can explain their position and the other cannot. But his scenario was more limited. The argument is: you couldn’t justify that, so it is false. I think that is a fallacy. And I’ve encounted that, though not here yet. I’ve also had one poster in another forum state that if I was unwilling to clarify my position and words, this proves that I was wrong - he continuously asks clarifying questions. In fact, if you ask him a clarifying question, you will get asked many clarifying questions before he will even begin to consider answering your question. And given that explanations lead to the use of more words, these all have to be clarified. He doesn’t seem to understand that the defacto result is that others must jusfity the entire English language and their logic, before he feels any need to justify anything. He’s an extreme example, but the declaration of something being proven based on the behavior of the other person rather on their own justification of their position is pretty rampant.
Also, I don’t know how to figure out the odds of the situation where one person explains and the other doesn’t (and my goodness if they manage to acknowledge they didn’t explain why the claim is true, I have no idea what the odds are. I mean, take a look around at this forum and notice the ‘explanations’. I’d at least like to see some empirical evidence that those who explain (and perhaps especially here) are more likely to be correct than a person who hasn’t (especially if they actually admit that).
In any case, I think shifting the issue away from figuring out truth ratios and towards the interpersonal interaction. People should not expect others to be convinced by unsupported claims. If they somehow do think that others should be, that is fallacious thinking.
Yes in part but when the feeling that the particular phenomenal experience reduced to fastisity, that is to the point below objective evaluation between right, just and bad unjust, at that point all becomes insignificant subjective criteria, above and beyond any limits which could actually function to establish any confidence in such evaluations. So it becomes a fallacy within a fallacious effort to get out from lower/higher forms of thinking fallacious.
The more one tries to get out , the more trapped into it one gets. Sort, of.
I agree it’s a proper informal fallacy, and that adding the other person changes it.
But where I’ve encountered that type of argument in the wild, it’s been more of a rhetorical point: not that the claim is false, but that the person making it (or maybe the audience) should reject it or can’t rely on it because they can’t explain it. In those cases, it can be a compelling point: if I’m uncertain about a question and I’m observing a debate about it, the person offering the most layers of explanation will tend to appear more convincing to me, and I don’t think that’s wrong. So while it’s fallacious to say that it’s false if it can’t be explained, it’s accurate to say that it’s less convincing.
Granted, “explanation” is only as convincing as it is good. One thing an explanation does in that context is just ‘showing your work’. If someone offers a terrible explanation and the other person offers none at all, that would undermine the former’s arguments and I’d probably be more convinced by the person not offering an explanation. Maybe that suggests that an explanation is neutral, but I think an explanation that I can’t understand in support of an argument that I can’t understand is likely to tilt me towards believing it (provided I think the reason I can’t understand the explanation is a failure of my own knowledge or intelligence, rather than that the explanation is actually nonsensical).
There are definitely times where I respect people who just acknowledge that they can’t explain something they believe to be true. A legitimate response to a demand for explanation is to say, “I can’t/won’t explain why I believe that claim, but do you accept that if the claim is true, my argument holds?” I don’t know that it works for someone pretending not to understand the plain meaning of common words, but that seems like it was a special case.
Thanks for proving your own point, albeit at your own expense, with this diatribe. You do raise a useful point of clarification though, namely what is the nature of a fallacy? Fallacies are mistaken reasoning, bad logic, and consequently bad or unjustified argumentation that occur in predictable ways we can see and label. The problematic nature of fallacies can be from invalidity or unsoundness but the bottom line is that fallacies are incorrect ways of thinking or reasoning, leading to unjustified argumentation or idea-defense.
Not sure what you mean by “conceptual knot” with regard to the definition of what a fallacy means, but the fallacies I’ve identified here meet the definition of being fallacies and in addition are fallacies I have not seen formally identified elsewhere. I did ask if anyone knows of these fallacies being identified please to let me know.
What I did here is list some novel fallacies (bad reasoning, incorrect thinking, unjustified argumentation patterns and insufficient claims, etc.) that I notice people falling into. I suppose they fall into them because no one has really pointed out to them what they are doing is fallacious. For example, in arguing against an idea or claim someone might say “Well that is only because of this (other reasons over there why the idea/claim is what it is” but without explaining how that is relevant to the idea/claim’s truthfulness or lack thereof. Hence merely pointing out that something has reasons for being what it is fails to rise to the standard of disproving that thing itself, UNLESS you can explain the connection therein and how the thing’s causal structure of reasons supporting it happens to invalidate it relative to the argument at hand.
In terms of your Palestine comment, maybe I can respond by telling you to go detonate hundreds of cell phones and pagers randomly throughout society thus killing innocent people including children in the process, and somehow being self-deceiving and pathological enough to not realize that is a blatant act of terrorism Or maybe you can use the supposed “big bad Palestinians” who are SUCH a threat to Israel (lol) that it justifies stealing all the rest of their lands not already stolen and genociding the rest of them not already genocided.
Thanks for this clarification. I can only respond by saying that that, as far as I have seen in my own interactions with people alive today (not referring back to how things were in previous times) they are certainly not operating in this manner, their own default skepticism fails to rise to the standards of usefulness that you point out and is rather a kind of crutch and “out” from any responsibility to bother authentically exploring a topic or an idea enough to form a coherent and meaningful argument for or against. What may have began as a beautiful philosophical strategy has decayed into pathology and mental laziness, which is sad to see considering many of those who are decayed in this way claim they are doing philosophy.