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An Argumentation Scheme for Debunking Arguments

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I've recently been going down a rabbit hole in the philosophical literature of "Debunking Arguments". A debunking argument tries to undermine the epistemic status of some class of beliefs by tracing them to a genealogy (an origin/explanation) that makes their truth epistemically accidental. The debunker doesn’t have to show the beliefs are false; rather, they aim to show you lack justification (or knowledge) for holding them given how they were formed. There are two major kinds of debunking arguments: local debunking and global debunking. Local debunking targets a restricted domain while global debunking aims at very wide domains (such as all normative beliefs). While reading the literature, I've come to realize that variations (mostly watered down and not technical) of debunking style arguments frequently arise in public discourse, conspiracies, and media. I began to wonder if I could formalize an argumentation scheme that captures not only philosophical elements, bu...
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More Silly Arguments

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Very often while sitting in a Protestant church, I will hear a non-trivial amount of C.S. Lewis references. It's not every day, but over some unspecified interval, there will easily be more references to Lewis during a sermon than church fathers like Augustine or founding theologians like Luther. These social dynamics are quite interesting. While Protestant lament the idea of a saint, they exalt figures like Lewis, Billy Graham, or any other apologist or charismatic preacher who's "defended the faith." Apologists like Lewis provide believers with stock arguments that can be used against "those skeptics seeking to undermine their beliefs." These arguments are not analytical instruments used to interrogate the internal validity and consistency of their belief system, they are often simple platitudes to be memorized without any critical interrogation into their merit. One in particular that I've heard woven into a few sermons, is Lewis's "Argument ...
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Michael Levin's Platonic Space Argument

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  Michael Levin is a professor of biology at Tufts University, and is quite a prolific thinker. I have been following his work for a while because he is very interdisciplinary; something I think modern academia is seriously lacking. His biological research overlaps with artificial life, bioengineering, computer science, behavioral science, and cognitive science; introducing a truly novel perspective on these overlapping subdomains. This is relevant to me because I think economics (my discipline) ought to incorporate some of the concepts and methods his lab takes seriously, such as: collectives, swarming behavior, emergence, scaling laws, evolutionary development, and process oriented thinking. I think he is modeling complex systems the correct way. A mere mortal like myself couldn't possibly make the intellectual strides he's made. I see him as a thinker I'd like to emulate. However, no one has the answers to everything, and I can't help but critically analyze every ar...
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A Few Thoughts on the Current Nonsense

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This is something I really don't want to write about. I have no interest in commenting on culture war pundits. Unfortunately, I can't keep my mouth shut. I'm simply disgusted by what's happened after the Charlie Kirk assassination. More so by the government's effective weaponization and response to the murder, but very much by the myth making surrounding who Kirk was. While he was alive, I tried to pay as little attention to him and the alt-right echo-chamber he proliferated in. I saw him as the epitome of degeneracy with respect to political discourse in the United States. This is what I'd like to focus on in this post; just a few thoughts on what this guy actually was and how disappointing this is. Then i'll comment on some of the aftermath. Who He Was Let's set the record straight on what he was. Charlie Kirk was a conservative influencer. He was a very dogmatic evangelical fundamentalist who was essentially an apologist for Trump. These two sentences...
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