| HN Mirror

Is this a good faith question? Or is it intended as a "gotcha"? I'm fine to spend a few minutes if you find this sort of thing fun.

I think I could, given the universe of people P, a set of belief frameworks E and a mapping B(belief) from P -> set(E). I would then try to say that my prior about B is that there's no E shared by all P.

Put another way, I think it's very likely there's nothing you can say that will convince everyone.

This would be an overly simplified model of reality because merely stating a valid argument in framework E held by some P is not sufficient to "convince" them. Also "epistemological frameworks" don't really exist, they're just a shorthand we can use to describe clusters of beliefs that often go together. Lots of other things about the argument matter, like how complex it is (reduces trust) or who is presenting it. Also, a given argument might be "valid" in multiple belief systems at once. Maybe we could add in the idea that a particular statement of an argument (call it A) which means different things in E1 and E2 is really two different arguments A1 and A2. How far you want to go with modelling is a matter of taste.

Do we disagree? Where? Maybe we can find a mutually acceptable model if you are interested.

If your overall point is that often people write complete garbage in the shape of a formal argument and then act like they've "proven" something - I 100% agree with you. We can't "mathematically prove" non-trivial things about reality but we can construct models and use tools to reason about them. I do believe that the activity of stating your model and then using tools can be helpful.