RE: Is the statement "Claims demand evidence" always true?
January 18, 2017 at 9:01 am
(This post was last modified: January 18, 2017 at 9:14 am by emjay.)
(January 17, 2017 at 11:50 pm)Khemikal Wrote: In my experience, when people equivocate, they don't do so intentionally. They honestly don't understand or see that they are conflating separate concepts called, by some or by them, by the same term. Leading to the inevitable "No I'm not!" response to having their comments identified as such.
You're probably better off checking sources specific to philosophy to understand the meaning of a fallacy, as the dictionary is, nine of ten times, giving you the conversational connotations.
Quote:1. The fallacy of equivocation is an argument which exploits the ambiguity of a term or phrase which has occurred at least twice in an argument, such that on the first occurrence it has one meaning and on the second another meaning.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/
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.
My definition was:
"equivocate To make a statement that is capable of being taken in more than one way, with the aim of exploiting the ambiguity."
From the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford Quick Reference), by Simon Blackburn, published: Feb 25, 2016 [Kindle]
So it was a philosophical source but which, when comparing to the length of your definition, only tells me I need to get a better philosophical dictionary
Anyway, the statue example was a tricky one for me because it appears to contain two (sets of?) uses of the word "I", one which is (arguably) valid and one which is ambiguous. The first use, the apparently valid one, is referring to personal experience in the moment, in which case you can indeed, in one moment, see the game as just pixels on a screen when you're in a grounded, objective frame of mind (or otherwise outside that context), but in another moment be so immersed in the game (or book, or film, or dream etc... as per my first post in this thread) that it becomes true and real to you in the moment... so much that you can say to someone who interrupts you "hang on a minute, I'm just about to get killed! [in the game]" and pretty much mean it. So arguably that usage is fine, provided it's in the moment. But the ambiguity for me comes from the second usage, when it's no longer in the moment as is the case when talking past tense about it or otherwise from a perspective outside the immediate context, such as in this thread. In that case, the common way to refer to an experience in another context is to qualify a statement with details about that context... such as 'I was dreaming and I saw such and such' rather than just 'I saw such and such'. And if you leave that context information out you can reasonably expect someone to ask you to provide it if they are unclear what you mean, again that being the usual/common response.
So if equivocation/conflation is defined as an undefined/unexplained deviation from the generally accepted (ie usual/common) use of a term - in this case how out of context information is usually referred to - and which leads to confusion and ambiguity because it differs from the accepted use of a term (ie most people's assumptions about how the term should be used), then that's why I concluded that Benny's statue argument was equivocation/conflation on the second usage of "I" but not (arguably) the first.