Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?

[bennyboy]

I've described what I mean by truth, and by evidence, more than enough times in this thread.   

I'm asking you to distill it down.  Please stop saying you've done it, and humor me by doing it once more, simply and. . . unequivocally.  I'm not saying you haven't, I'm saying I can't find it, and I'd like you to dumb it down for me.

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Just to say, after consulting a dictionary, equivocation doesn't mean quite what I thought it meant; I thought it just meant conflating terms, but the dictionary implies that equivocation is when it is done deliberately in a willful attempt to mislead. So I'm sorry about that Benny, I didn't mean that; I just thought you were conflating terms like I tend to do when I talk about neurons.

I assume you've found an example on your own, but I'll give one just to be very clear.  Christians might say something like, "Well. . . we know  there are physical laws, nobody debates that.  But maybe we should talk about who the law-MAKER was."  It's obvious to us that the laws of physics aren't meant to be viewed as those kinds of laws, but very much less obvious to the Christians-- I'm pretty sure that WLC had explicitly used that argument, actually.

To be fair to Rhythm, I have used some words in different ways.  That's because it's a long thread and I'm turning over a few different ideas in my head.  But using different definitions is only really an equivocation fallacy if it's a deliberate attempt to redirect the outcome of a discussion.  Sometimes using "true" to mean that a statement is accurate, or sometimes using it to say that is logically coherent, isn't really an equivocation fallacy.

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It's the first fallacy listed, and for good reason, lol.  An example from this thread would include questions as to whether "I" am sitting in my chair gaming..or "I" am pieing the corner with an AWP about to hs a noob near a statue.  "I" has been equivocated upon.  One of them is true, the other is not - not even "true in context"...it's not even accurate.  This is why using the two examples to establish varying truths in context, or simultaneously true but contradictory statements (paradox) fails.  If we agree upon the subject of I (is it me, or my ingame avatar) what may seem to be a disparity vanishes...and if we examine the phenomenon of a video game, we find that there is no corner, no statue, just arrays of lit bits.  A more comprehensive refutation of a conflation between the two can hardly be imagined.  Not only is the equivocation invalid, as all equivocations are, it also rests on unsound premises.

This really isn't an equivocation. In both cases, I'm using the word "I" to talk about an experiencing agent experiencing stuff. I do in fact experience a dragon-- you will argue since it's not really really a real dragon, it doesn't count as a dragon at all. But nevertheless, there it is, and I can see smoke coming out of its mouth.

You seem to think there's the "real" I and the game avatar. That's fine, but I can pretty easily demonstrate that your "real" life is a virtual experience as well. There is, for example, no color in the universe. Apples are, in fact, not "red." We convert signals from various receptors in our eyes to chemical-electrical signals, process them, and finally, at the end of a chain of billions of discrete physical events, say, "Aha! I see something red!" Do you think there is so much difference between photons coming from a high-definition monitor and those coming from say a star?

No. The difference is that you think one particular input into your brain represents something really, really, real, and one doesn't. But therein lies the rub-- as many times as you claim I'm equivocating, you are special pleading. You are insisting on taking your metaphysical view as THE context, rather than A context, and filtering everything through that worldview, despite having no philosophical, evidential or other means to prove that your view is right. (I'd say "true" but I don't feel like another golden shower right now)