No. Attributing a motive is a matter of interpretation...
Yes, attributing a motive is a matter of interpretation, but the attribution of motive is unequal to the discovery of truth. Rather than discover a motive you wish to infer one probably because inference provides enough rhetorical "wiggle room" to keep the conspiracy debate artificially active whereas a more straightforward approach defeats it outright. My previous point still stands: what you or I believe about someone else's motive is independent of what that motive really is, no matter how strongly we believe it or upon what evidence.
You're quite predictably playing out the scenario I outlined. Rather than look to see whether John is alive or dead, you're trying to rewrite the question to ask if Jane can be inferred to have taken certain actions. In a search for truth it doesn't matter what motives, beliefs, or actions can be attributed to Jane and what might be their consequents. If the consequents didn't happen, they didn't happen and the attribution is wrong no matter how cleverly it was inferred.
...fitting their act with previous acts, and telling a plausible story about it. This is why people may be confused or mistaken about their own motives.
So then may I argue that you are confused or mistaken about your motive in posting at BAUT?
Your line of reasoning would be more persuasive if you yourself hadn't contradicted it when the tables were turned against you. You may recall some weeks ago there was a discussion about you and your motives for posting here at BAUT, and your motives for having argued a certain way. I attempted to fit your acts with those of others (namely other conspiracy theorists), alleging that you and they had similar motives. I told a plausible story.
Do you recall how you responded? I can tell you how you didn't respond. You certainly didn't address the line of reasoning upon which my attribution of motive was based, which is what I would expect you to do if you thought attributed motives were valid. You didn't argue that I had improperly interpreted your actions. You didn't dispute the observations that fed the interpretation. Instead you dismissed the whole exercise as invalid, and my "opinion" of your motives as empty and inapplicable. It seems your position on the validity of attributed motives differs depending on whose motive is in question.
That motives may sometimes be confused is not proof that some particular motive is confused. But you elucidate below, so we don't need to discuss it here.
Incredibly patronising. Scientists easily understand it, philosophers don't, therefore what scientists think they understand must be true?
Yes, for certain values of "true". Scientists engage in investigation whose results depend for their value on the congruence of their implications with observable behavior. Engineers are scientists who can be held legally accountable for the accuracy of that congruence. Predictiveness and accountability are not served by arbitrary or conjectural relaxation. You cannot argue yourself out of responsibility for a collapsed building by contemplating that gravity is merely a normative experience and therefore not subject to objective characterization, nor does such an approach help you correct the process by which buildings are designed and constructed.
Philosophers have little such accountability. While this frees them to discuss esoteric matters of epistemology, and to define away the notion of "fact" in favor of universal subjectivity, such exercises provide no practical discovery of truth in actual occurrences. No amount of academic combustion of neurons substitutes for metallurgy and dynamics in determining why an airplane disintegrated in flight.
When you rewrite my questions to make them normative (which you have done since the very beginning) you eliminate their power to discover. An investigation seeks an answer, not ongoing debate. Philosophy seems instead to gravitate toward the latter.
I have no trouble conceding that absolute truths exist; just not in this case.
If you attribute to me a motive that is not mine, your attribution is wrong. Period.
Below you discuss where motives might be ambiguous. But if the motive is not ambiguous then an attribution of motive clearly has the opportunity objectively to be wrong. And if an attribution of motive might be objectively wrong, then it is proper to ask what steps were taken to test its objective correctness -- whether it's true, not whether it follows inferentially from something else.
Scientists like you find it hard to concede that in certain areas no absolute truths exist...
As you've probably guessed, I have no problem conceding that absolute truth is absent in some areas -- just not in this case. My reason is given below.
I have no memory of conceding that. I may have not taken you up on it any further...
My memory may be in error as well.
A well-worn topic in the philosophy of mind, which is one area well within my expertise.
Ah, so expertise is relevant, but only when you employ it?
[sarcasm]Of course forensic engineers know nothing of human factors and the sociological aspects of decision-making[/sarcasm]. (Hint: it's a cornerstone of the field.)
What I deny is that it 'must be a unified motive'. An organisation's act may be deliberate, even as it is the product of a number of individuals each acting with their own motive.
Yes. Actually this would be a fun topic for non-confrontational discussion as well.
I addressed this earlier, but not clearly or fully. And because of what I say in the paragraph below, I won't dwell a lot on it. Nevertheless I do want you to believe that I understand your point and am not evading it. I agree that corporate actions can derive from the aggregated but uncoordinated individual motives of its constituents. But if you have a nonunified policy, and it has great social importance, then you breed whistle-blowers and other forms of internal dissent that can themselves be made externally visible. My purpose in speaking of unified motives was to establish the proposition that arriving at it would leave behind evidence that others could see. The same can also be said for uncoordinated motives, except that the evidence in that case would be evidence of dissent, not of consent, and may arise subsequent to the expression of motive. In either case the consequent is scrutable evidence, which then becomes the premise for imposing a burden of proof.
But let's withdraw from the abstract and return to the concrete. There is a statement of motive from the Pentagon. One of the straw-men hypotheses I posted previously was, in fact, the stated reason for the delay. I realize you have questioned the credibility of that reason, and we can debate that another time. The existence of the reason is salient to this discussion: it substantiates that deliberation likely took place at the Pentagon (or elsewhere), either to agree that this was the true motive, or to concoct it as a cover story to supplant the secret (agreed-upon) motive. Thus I believe a corporate motive exists in this case as an absolute. Thus an attributed motive is either correct or incorrect.
That, in fact, is to my mind the most plausible line a conspiracist would take here.
This is a perfect example of the fence-sitting that makes this an unworkable discussion in its current form.
You constantly remind us that you speak only for yourself, and to that end you refer to conspiracists in the third person and to their arguments with a certain detachment.
You've provided an engaging (if disputable) line of reasoning in their defense, but neither you nor I have any way of knowing whether any conspiracists actually subscribe to it. If they don't, then I'm debating you over your ideas and your defense doesn't apply to them. But on the other hand if they do, then you really do espouse their ideas and arguments and thus advocating them here commits you to a responsibility that contradicts your preferred detachment.
If the idea is central and not the proponent, then you can't substitute one idea for another in red-herring fashion. A constructive discussion must allow for an idea to be rejected, because the aim of constructive debate is to test the strength of an idea. Not all ideas are strong and can withstand the test. But the surreptitious substitution of a stronger idea for a similar but weaker one in a discussion is more consistent with the centrality of a proponent seeking to save face.
So the evidence would then consist of looking at the acts of that individuals (those few individuals), and providing a plausible interpretation fitting those actions. That is a normative discussion.
I agree that what you propose is a normative discussion. I do not agree that the normative discussion you propose is an effective method of discovering the truth. My question is what have the conspiracists done to discover the truth of why the Pentagon delayed the release of the video. You respond that they (may) have attributed a motive based on a defensible line of inference. I have argued at length why I do not accept that as valid precisely because it is normative. I don't care what motives conspiracists attribute to the Pentagon; I want to know whether they have tried to discover any.
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