Mockery is neither data nor reasoning: no update is epistemically required of the person attacked. The outcome is a matter of their fortitude, not the rights or wrongs of their case. The purpose of mockery is to crush the hated enemy by shouting loudly.
Mockery is neither data nor reasoning: no update is epistemically required of the person attacked.
That depends—mockery is just a form in which many things can be clothed, including data and reasoning.
But in any case, the original claim was
If a view cannot stand up to mockery, it doesn’t deserve defenders
which, without too much contortions, could be reformulated as “a view which cannot encourage sufficient fortitude in any of its defenders does not deserve to be defended”. And then you said
if you can bully someone out of defending their beliefs, you win
You do? What do you win? And how does that relate to whether the belief mocked was (epistemically) correct or not?
I think you’re confusing the issue of whether something is valued (and so worth defending) with whether something is empirically/scientifically correct (and so “true”).
Or in other words, if you can bully someone out of defending their beliefs, you win.
Really?
No, that does not follow. Your straw is very weak.
No straw, but purest steel. I stand by my words.
Mockery is neither data nor reasoning: no update is epistemically required of the person attacked. The outcome is a matter of their fortitude, not the rights or wrongs of their case. The purpose of mockery is to crush the hated enemy by shouting loudly.
That depends—mockery is just a form in which many things can be clothed, including data and reasoning.
But in any case, the original claim was
which, without too much contortions, could be reformulated as “a view which cannot encourage sufficient fortitude in any of its defenders does not deserve to be defended”. And then you said
You do? What do you win? And how does that relate to whether the belief mocked was (epistemically) correct or not?
I think you’re confusing the issue of whether something is valued (and so worth defending) with whether something is empirically/scientifically correct (and so “true”).