It seems to me that your reasoning here resembles a common (and in my opinion very wrong) pattern of thought: “These people say X; also, Y; X and Y imply Z; therefore these people think Z”. The reason it’s wrong, of course, is that these people may well not believe Y. There is maybe an implicit “no one with half a brain reasoning in good faith could fail to believe Y”, and I think such propositions are usually false.
Psychologizing Benquo a bit, I think there’s a further piece. I think that, according to him, in a very large number of cases, the logical link from X to Z is so obvious that anyone that was seriously attempting to find the truth at all, would make that inference. Thus, if a person fails to see a point this basic, the most likely conclusion is that they’re arguing in bad faith, instead of trying to seek truth.
(See for instance Micheal Vasser, who is not Benquo, but who does broadly agree, I think, explicitly making a similar point about blindspots here. [My analysis of that thread here.])
That “further piece” is what I was pointing at with “no one with half a brain reasoning in good faith could fail to believe Y”. (At least, it’s almost that. Your version doesn’t mention Y, and of course it may well be in some of these cases that the people thinking in this way haven’t noticed that Y is a thing at all because it seems so obvious to them.)
Psychologizing Benquo a bit, I think there’s a further piece. I think that, according to him, in a very large number of cases, the logical link from X to Z is so obvious that anyone that was seriously attempting to find the truth at all, would make that inference. Thus, if a person fails to see a point this basic, the most likely conclusion is that they’re arguing in bad faith, instead of trying to seek truth.
(See for instance Micheal Vasser, who is not Benquo, but who does broadly agree, I think, explicitly making a similar point about blindspots here. [My analysis of that thread here.])
That “further piece” is what I was pointing at with “no one with half a brain reasoning in good faith could fail to believe Y”. (At least, it’s almost that. Your version doesn’t mention Y, and of course it may well be in some of these cases that the people thinking in this way haven’t noticed that Y is a thing at all because it seems so obvious to them.)