What's your sin to reason, where you open your eyes, and so under what you'll find with an open mind, you may be surprised.

Hey everybody, we're live. Happy New Year. It's January 6th, 2013. I'm Matt Delhanay. Join me this week, Tracy Harris.

And I'm in sick for two days, so I apologize if I sound all clogged up and stuff, but I've got lots of pseudofed to kind of hop me up for the rest of the show.

This is a live call in television program out of Austin, Texas, and before we start taking calls, how are you and what have you got going on?

I'm doing well, and I have, I think we mentioned trolling with logic, so I'll be on trolling with logic this month.

And the only thing I really had to talk about was it's something that we get a lot. It's an argument that we get a lot, and I don't even know what to call it.

I'm sure it's a variant on a couple of different arguments put together, but it's basically what I'm calling the argument from agreement or the argument from this makes sense to me, and I got it to make sense to someone else, and therefore it must be true.

Yeah, it's almost like an argument from popularity that's sort of after the fact, if I can get enough people to agree with me and make it popular, then I'll know that it's true.

And so what happens is somebody will argue with you using some sort of an argument which will ultimately never in any way have any mode of validation verification confirmation.

So they're putting forward something and saying, I think this makes sense, and arguing it with you, like almost trying to convince you to agree that it makes sense, and yet ultimately there will never be any way to determine the truth value for it.

So you just kind of wonder, where is this going? And ultimately it's like, don't argue with me, don't try to make me agree with you that this makes sense.

At the end of it, when I say, okay, I understand why you're saying it makes sense. How do we verify this? If the answer is, I can't, then it's irrelevant whether I agreed with you or not, because we're both sitting there saying, I understand why you think this makes sense, and yet we can't sign a truth value to it, because there's no way to verify it or validate or confirm it.

So it was just a useless endeavor. As far as time wasting, if the ultimate goal was to somehow determine a truth value for whatever it is that you're trying to talk about, if you're going to assert that it's worth believing, then you're going to have to assign, you know, you're claiming that there should be a value of true.

And yet, without any means of confirmation and validation verification, you're just sort of left with, it makes sense, but I don't know if it's true or not, because there are some things that make sense which do align with what can be demonstrated in objective reality without a subjective bias.

And there are some things that actually seem to make sense, and then when you test them, people are surprised that the outcomes are not what they expected.

So just because something makes sense where you would think that that would be expected outcome, it doesn't mean that that's what you're going to get, and that's why people test things, because you have to remove biases, and sometimes what we think makes sense actually is not what's going on in reality.

And so we have to find a way to differentiate those things that are reasonable, but not true, versus reasonable, but true.

And just because it makes sense to us is not really going quite far enough to assign a value of true to it.

Yeah, I think it might actually qualify as an argument had appeal to popularity, because I don't know that that as a fallacy necessarily means that it requires a raw popularity.

Right, right. It's just my friends.

Other people agree with me, and so I'm right.

And yes, if you're assigning a value of true to it, then you know, reasonable doesn't cut it.

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