I would suggest that the most likely reason for logical rudeness—not taking the multiple-choice—is that most arguments beyond a certain level of sophistication have more unstated premises than they have stated premises.
And I suspect it’s not easy to identify unstated premises. Not just the ones you don’t want to say, belief-in-belief sort of things, but ones you as an arguer simply aren’t sufficiently skilled to describe.
As an example:
For example: Nick Bostrom put forth the Simulation Argument, which is that you must disagree with either statement (1) or (2) or else agree with statement (3):
In the given summary (which may not accurately describe the full argument; for the purposes of the demonstration, it doesn’t matter either way), Mr. Bostrom doesn’t note that, presumably, the number of potential simulated earths immensely outnumbers the number of nonsimulated earths as a result of his earlier statements. But that premise doesn’t necessarily hold!
If the inverse of the chances of an Earth reaching simulation-level progress without somehow self-exterminating or being exterminated (say, 1 in 100) is lower than the average number of Earth-simulations that society runs (so less than 100), then the balance of potential earths does not match the unstated premise… in universes sufficiently large for multiple Earths to exist (See? A potential hidden premise in my proposal of a hidden premise! These things can be tricky).
And if most arguers aren’t good at discerning hidden premises, then arguers can feel like they’re falling into a trap: that there must be a premise there, hidden, but undiscovered, that provides a more serious challenge to the argument than they can muster. And with that possibility, an average arguer might want to simply be quiet on it, expecting a more skilled arguer to discern a hidden premise that they couldn’t.
That doesn’t seem rude to me, but humble; a concession of lack of individual skill when faced with a sufficiently sophisticated argument.
I would suggest that the most likely reason for logical rudeness—not taking the multiple-choice—is that most arguments beyond a certain level of sophistication have more unstated premises than they have stated premises.
And I suspect it’s not easy to identify unstated premises. Not just the ones you don’t want to say, belief-in-belief sort of things, but ones you as an arguer simply aren’t sufficiently skilled to describe.
As an example:
In the given summary (which may not accurately describe the full argument; for the purposes of the demonstration, it doesn’t matter either way), Mr. Bostrom doesn’t note that, presumably, the number of potential simulated earths immensely outnumbers the number of nonsimulated earths as a result of his earlier statements. But that premise doesn’t necessarily hold!
If the inverse of the chances of an Earth reaching simulation-level progress without somehow self-exterminating or being exterminated (say, 1 in 100) is lower than the average number of Earth-simulations that society runs (so less than 100), then the balance of potential earths does not match the unstated premise… in universes sufficiently large for multiple Earths to exist (See? A potential hidden premise in my proposal of a hidden premise! These things can be tricky).
And if most arguers aren’t good at discerning hidden premises, then arguers can feel like they’re falling into a trap: that there must be a premise there, hidden, but undiscovered, that provides a more serious challenge to the argument than they can muster. And with that possibility, an average arguer might want to simply be quiet on it, expecting a more skilled arguer to discern a hidden premise that they couldn’t.
That doesn’t seem rude to me, but humble; a concession of lack of individual skill when faced with a sufficiently sophisticated argument.