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TWO_STAGES

                                            September 17, 2021

                                            From material originally published
                                            at the dailykos in 2015.

                                                                TWO_GATES

The Two Stages of Evaluation

A number of issues are clarified once you think in terms of
a dual-level process.

We have a long, highly developed tradition of what standards
to apply at the second level when scholars are engaged in
detailed study and debate. This is the world in which the
logical fallacies were originally formulated.

Expecting these standards to work the same for the first
level strikes me as a source of confusion.

There's no contradiction between "citing experts" and
calling "arguing from authority" a fallacy if you think of
seeking experts as a heuristic that gets applied at an early
stage of screening, when trying to decide if a source of
information is worth paying attention to at all. The
standard logical fallacies are part of a different more
rigorous approach that's applied to something that's made it
through the initial stage. If someone keeps insisting that
expertise settles everything once you've made it past the
initial filter, then it's appropriate to complain about
argument from authority.

Most of the explicit rules of intellectual engagement
that we have effectively presume that you've made it
through that initial filter.  We have very little in       Just having
the way of codified rules for how (or when) our            recognized names
initial filters are supposed to work.                      for the two stages
                                                           could be helpful.
Maybe it's worth thinking about what we do
and firming up our strategies, and possibly
developing some new ones.

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