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Evaluate an argument


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Let us suppose that Mister B affirms that Mister A lies. What should be done and what should not be done to evaluate B's assertion?

I guess the following procedures do not apply:

1. Find Mister A and ask him: do you lie?
2. Find friends of A and with them consult the veracity of A.
3. Consult people who work for A and / or receive money from A.

That is, it is not appropriate to consult Mister A, or people linked to A for affection or for money.

What should be done? This is the laborious part. The only way is to look for affirmations of A that have been documented, perhaps spanning many years, to contrast them with the facts that A produced linked to those assertions.

Normally no person and no group, vocational or institutional, develops that laborious task to evaluate the veracity. Then A can always answer each accusation with an argument that suits him, because nobody will have collected enough evidence.

In each activity there are a number of people who practice it and the rest of society does not. That rest sees only what practitioners put at the public disposal. The set of elements made available to the public constitutes what we can call the facade of the activity, by comparison with the facade of a building, which is publicly visible.

There are people who do not trust the public facade of science. They assume that the science made available to the public is not the best version, nor is it the most far-reaching version, nor is it the most powerful version. Something analogous, in that aspect, to the public version of the satellite vision system (Google Earth). For military use and for other uses that are not public, there is a much more powerful version with much greater scope.

According to the accusation of these people, the public facade of science would be the limited version, that is, the analogue to Google Earth. And there would be a version for private use, endowed with a much broader and much deeper knowledge, which gives those who possess it unimaginable possibilities for us.

According to that accusation, instead of a Mister A, within the science there is a group A that possesses the complete knowledge and does not make it publicly available. The accusing group fulfills the same role fulfilled by Mister B in the initial example.

With that example we learned that it is not appropriate to consult the accused party, or people linked by affection or for money with the accused party. To which persons, institutions or groups does it not correspond to consult, if we want to evaluate the argument of the two versions of science? And what would be the proper procedures to examine the subject in a truly objective way?

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