How is ‘everyone an authority’ different from ‘there are no authorities?’
Well, using your definition of authority as “person with opinions that others agree with”, these statements would translate as follows:
‘everyone is an authority’ becomes “Every person has opinions that others agree with.”
‘there are no authorities’ becomes “No person has opinions that others agree with.”
The problem is that you seem to want to use the connotations of the word “authority”, but you aren’t explicitly including them in your definition.
What’s your definition?.
I don’t use the word ‘authority’ in reference to people, because it communicates meaning badly. I’d prefer to use a word like ‘expert’ or a phrase like ‘informed on the subject’.
Someone is more of an expert on something than someone else if they have more useful experience on it.
Someone is more informed of a topic than someone else if they possess more accurate information about it.
You keep arguing about definitions and you’ve still not uttered any concrete disagreement, you still seem to be just playing with words.
At the risk of repeating myself I’ll weigh in here: X is an authority with respect to a proposition P to the extent that X’s assertion of P is evidence for P.
On many topics, some people’s assertions are stronger evidence than others. That makes those people authorities on those topics, relatively speaking.
To my mind, the interesting question is how we best distinguish actual authorities on a topic from people who merely claim authority. That’s difficult. But the first step in learning distinguish among A and B is to acknowledge that A and B actually are different things: in this case, that actual authorities on a topic are a distinct thing in the world from non-authorities.
Asserting that there are no authorities, or that everyone is equally authoritative, is a step in the wrong direction.
You know what, if you were to actually have to program a conclusion-drawing machine, not just philosophize about it, I’d bet that your decision algorithm in which conclusions are drawn “based upon the rationality of their assertions alone” would be indistinguishable from a decision algorithm in which conclusions are based on “‘evidence’ (which are opinions)”.
You might name the functions differently through, you might have a “concludeBasedOnRationailty()” function instead of a “concludeBasedOnEvidence()” function. I bet it would still translate into the same code, because there’s not a single word you’ve stated that relates to anything other than how we name things.
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Appropriate authority:Expert.
Expert: Person whose opinions are worth something.
Well, using your definition of authority as “person with opinions that others agree with”, these statements would translate as follows:
‘everyone is an authority’ becomes “Every person has opinions that others agree with.”
‘there are no authorities’ becomes “No person has opinions that others agree with.”
The problem is that you seem to want to use the connotations of the word “authority”, but you aren’t explicitly including them in your definition.
I don’t use the word ‘authority’ in reference to people, because it communicates meaning badly. I’d prefer to use a word like ‘expert’ or a phrase like ‘informed on the subject’.
.
To quote, prefix the quote with a greater-than sign
>. See the “Show help” button for more.Someone is more of an expert on something than someone else if they have more useful experience on it. Someone is more informed of a topic than someone else if they possess more accurate information about it.
You keep arguing about definitions and you’ve still not uttered any concrete disagreement, you still seem to be just playing with words.
At the risk of repeating myself I’ll weigh in here: X is an authority with respect to a proposition P to the extent that X’s assertion of P is evidence for P.
On many topics, some people’s assertions are stronger evidence than others. That makes those people authorities on those topics, relatively speaking.
To my mind, the interesting question is how we best distinguish actual authorities on a topic from people who merely claim authority. That’s difficult. But the first step in learning distinguish among A and B is to acknowledge that A and B actually are different things: in this case, that actual authorities on a topic are a distinct thing in the world from non-authorities.
Asserting that there are no authorities, or that everyone is equally authoritative, is a step in the wrong direction.
.
You know what, if you were to actually have to program a conclusion-drawing machine, not just philosophize about it, I’d bet that your decision algorithm in which conclusions are drawn “based upon the rationality of their assertions alone” would be indistinguishable from a decision algorithm in which conclusions are based on “‘evidence’ (which are opinions)”.
You might name the functions differently through, you might have a “concludeBasedOnRationailty()” function instead of a “concludeBasedOnEvidence()” function. I bet it would still translate into the same code, because there’s not a single word you’ve stated that relates to anything other than how we name things.