Peter J.,

Many people here are familiar with the field of logical analysis. The nature of the debate here emphasizes a rigorous epistemology. You have been subjected to several terms here that refer to specious lines of reasoning, and have misunderstood some of them to be insults. They are not.

In particular, I often respond to statements (which I excerpt in boldface) with a brief identification of which fallacy has been committed by it. I hope by that practice to trim the discussion. However, it sometimes gets misinterpreted as cursory dismissal.

Here's a brief glossary -- by no means an exhaustive one. Keep in mind that there's really no One True taxonomy of unreliable reasoning, so the ideas often overlap and are known by different names.

Handwaving. A uselessly general and incomplete argument, often made in an off-hand fashion. It is meant to head off a detailed discussion. When you respond to specific questions with general or dismissive answers, because you don't know the answer, that's an example of handwaving. Handwaving often fools laymen, who also don't know what detail would be required to satisfy a question. Remember, many of us are experts in space engineering or photographic analysis or other relevant fields; we can tell when someone is faking an understanding.

When you are asked to substantiate your (implied) expertise in something, or to give a more detailed answer, that's a sign you might be handwaving.

Begging the question. Informally this phrase is used to indicate raising a question. Instead in logical analysis, begging a question means generally to ask or expect someone to agree with you without your having to provide an argument. When you imply that everyone ought to see what you see in the photographs and agree with you that they are somehow anomalous, that's begging the question. Your dismissal of the AGC's capabilities would also be considered begging the question. (In logic, the "question" often means a proposition -- a statement, not an interrogatory.) The "question" is the alleged incapacity of the AGC; "begging" it means that you're describing properties of the AGC, but not putting them in any useful context. You just assume that showing the AGC to be weak by some arbitrary standard is enough to claim it was not appropriate to the task.

Straw man rebuttal. This was already explained. Putting words in other people's mouths and attacking those words is the best example. But it can also mean a selective treatment of arguments that actually were made. Formally, it is an attack upon a weakened form of the opponent's evidence in hopes that it will be considered a successful attack of the evidence as it was intended. The name derives from the fanciful scenario of a warrior demonstrating his "skill" in combat by tearing into an enemy made of straw (i.e., who can't fight back).

At the beginning of this debate, Gillianren briefly believe you were suggesting Photoshop was used to manipulate the Apollo photos. Although this was quickly cleared up, you extended that one error by one person to everyone here, ignoring the stronger arguments that were made. Yes, it's easy to take one person to task for a clear error, but the strength of your argument lies not in how well you dispatch the easy responses but in how well you attend the strong ones.

The instance in which you believed yourself to have been insulted arose from your statement, "You think that governments don't lie?" That was identified as a straw-man argument because it implies the reason we accept Apollo as genuine is because we trust the government in all things. That's not our argument, but it would be easier for you to make your point if that was really what we believed.

Poisoning the well. This was your initial tactic. It's a form of ad hominem attack that tries to portray your opponents as untrustworthy or nefarious, as an indirect way of suggesting that what they say ought not to be believed. It falls under the ad hominem family of fallacies because it doesn't really look at whether the alleged facts are true or false, or whether they can be determined true or false. The ability of someone to reason correctly is not affected by their alleged untrustworthiness, because the strength of an inference depends entirely upon the properties of the inference, and not at all upon the properties of who proposed it.

We haven't come to the following, but the pattern of debate in this thread suggests we soon will.

Affirmed consequent. In logic, the "consequent" is the effect of some cause, the cause being called the "antecedent." To affirm a consequent means simply to observe than an effect has truly occurred; the fallacy is committed when the affirmed consequent is used as proof for one desired cause, possibly among many. In cause-and-effect explanations, a falsifiable argument must be given to establish that the identified cause is really the one that occurred, and not some other cause.

Very often, however, an indirect method of proof is chosen. Please read what I've written on that. http://www.clavius.org/holmes.html

Aristotle's classic example is the wetness of the ground being observed and considered evidence of its having rained.

Limited scope. When attempting to explain an observation, a candidate explanation must reasonably explain all the observations of that same ilk. An explanation that address one example, say, of low-gravity locomotion (e.g., "they slowed down the film") but doesn't explain many other examples, is less likely to be true than a single explanation that works for all.

So if you see something that looks like the first sentence fragment is meant to identify the flaw in reasoning: in this case circular reasoning. It is never meant to be any sort of epithet or insult. If you understand what I and others mean by these terms, you can get by with less verbage in the discussion.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
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