On Saturday, July 15, 2017 at 7:55:46 PM UTC-5, Steve D'Aprano wrote: > On Sun, 16 Jul 2017 12:31 am, Rick Johnson wrote: > > > I never hear Chinese or eastern Europeans > > bellyaching > > Do you speak much to Chinese and Eastern Europeans who > don't speak or write English? How would you know what they > say? > > "All toupées are bad. I've never seen a good one that looked real." > > http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy
A good retort! But not airtight, i'm afraid. Here, allow me to explain... The implication of the Toupee Fallacy is that one cannot ever discover a "good toupee", since "good toupees" would be indistinguishable from _real_ hair. Which is true, however, the Toupee Fallacy also applies inversely... What i mean is that your implicit implication that i am unable to discover "good toupees", and therefore unable to quantify them, also applies to your inability to prove that "Good Toupees" even exist. Sure, we can _assume_ that "Good Toupees" exist, but such a conjecture would never be _scientific_. Therefore, the Toupee Fallacy is invalid as a weapon of debate because it relies on the unproved premise that "Good Toupees" even exist. Isn't that ironic? Dontcha think? [1] Save that the experimenter yanked on the hair of every person she encountered, which of course is not polite, so we will safely assume that such techniques, while arguably 100% scientific, were not used during the "Toupee Fallacy Study". Which incidentally is why the media never dubbed it the "Toupee Terror Attacks". But i digress... -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
