What does he think one is DOING when one cites a “peer reviewed scientific journal”?
That is an appeal to authority.
If this were NOT how science “works” we wouldn’t have the REPRODUCIBILITY CRISIS in which we recently found out that, in sciences like psychology and sociology, from 50-85% of the published experiments COULD NOT BE REPLICATED.
Scientists believe MOST of what they believe in the basis of sources they regard as AUTHORITATIVE.
Do you believe in the existence of the Higgs Boson?
Have you done the math and the quantum theory that predicts it YOURSELF?
Have you used The Large Hadron Collider at CERN for YOURSELF? (Or spend billions of dollars to make your own?)
No?
Then you are relying on AUTHORITY.
That scientists rely on the AUTHORITY of other scientists for their scientific knowledge is trivially obvious.
And there is nothing wrong with an appeal to authority. When you get sick, do you go to a doctor?
If you refuse to see a doctor because that would be an appeal to authority fallacy, you’re a fool.
As I’ve endless noted, material fallacies like appeal to authority are only SOMETIMES fallacious. An appeal to authority is only a fallacy, an error, when it is done wrong, usually appealing to non-authoritative pseudo-authority.
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As Putnam notes, the fact/value dichotomy fails because it never manages to actually distinguish the two entirely, due to a kind of necessary entanglement (or kinds) between putative "facts" and "values."
What we have is a situation of distinction where in some facts are not values, some facts are values, some values are facts, and some values are not facts.
What we do not have is a fact/value dichotomy which amounts to a metaphysical dualism.
This is one of my rules. I use language quite carefully. When someone response to something I have said by calling it "word salad," nothing is lost by blocking them.
There is no possibility they are being an honest interlocutor.
Anyone with more that a child's level of acquaintance with theology should understand that talk about God will always be quite unlike talk about anything else, unlike talk about any creature (which everything but God is).
This does *seem like* a huge incoherence in transgender ideology.
It seems as if it is absurd on its face to say that children can consent to medical "transition" and a lifetime of medicalization and sterilization, but not consent to smoking a cigarette or having a beer.
An honest atheist (if there were such a thing) might say that he does not believe in an uncreated creator. No!—he must pretend that the concept of an uncreated creator is nonsense!
As if everything that does an action need be susceptible to such an action!
A lot of picture-thinkers will form an image of what’s being talked about and then think something that only belongs to the image belongs to the idea itself. Which in turn causes them to miss/reject other cases that instantiate the idea but don’t fit their particular image.
Descartes gives an example of the limits of substituting pictures/the imagination from concepts/the intellect:
Consider a chiliagon, a thousand-sided figure with equal sides. Conceptually, this is easy to understand, but it is impossible to picture clearly and distinctly.