Sound arguments from faulty premises are still sound arguments – but identifying whether premises are valid is hard.
My heuristic, "if a sound argument concludes that racism is true, there's something wrong with the premises", is pretty effective in telling me where to look, but doesn't eliminate the hard work of distinguishing truth from falsehood. That this heuristic has never failed doesn't actually prove that all racism is false: only that all racism is afaik unevidenced, and that many specific theories of racism are false. (It does, however, provide increasing evidence that racists believe racism for reasons other than empirical observation, allowing me to confidently discount the evidentiality of their claims.)
I have slightly less evidence, but still quite a lot, generalising this from racism specifically, to all bigotry, which does put me at odds with the academic consensus in certain areas where I'm not otherwise an expert. Those academic consensuses do seem to be moving towards my understanding, though, so it seems to me that this is a pretty neat trick for getting ahead of the curve. (I'm a little surprised that intersectional feminist theory isn't taught to social scientists in school: what I rediscovered by brute-force has been known to the philosophers for decades.)
pillefitz|6 months ago
wizzwizz4|6 months ago
My heuristic, "if a sound argument concludes that racism is true, there's something wrong with the premises", is pretty effective in telling me where to look, but doesn't eliminate the hard work of distinguishing truth from falsehood. That this heuristic has never failed doesn't actually prove that all racism is false: only that all racism is afaik unevidenced, and that many specific theories of racism are false. (It does, however, provide increasing evidence that racists believe racism for reasons other than empirical observation, allowing me to confidently discount the evidentiality of their claims.)
I have slightly less evidence, but still quite a lot, generalising this from racism specifically, to all bigotry, which does put me at odds with the academic consensus in certain areas where I'm not otherwise an expert. Those academic consensuses do seem to be moving towards my understanding, though, so it seems to me that this is a pretty neat trick for getting ahead of the curve. (I'm a little surprised that intersectional feminist theory isn't taught to social scientists in school: what I rediscovered by brute-force has been known to the philosophers for decades.)