Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue

For instance, she criticizes James Scott's "Against the Grain" for using a different definition of 'state' than the first one she found on wikipedia, but it is unclear why this is a bad thing. In fact, Scott himself notes that there are many competing definitions of state that are all imperfect in his context; and that ultimately the choice of one or another is rather arbitrary. It is so that he can develop this context that Scott delays his formal definition. In searching for a legible, bold-face, definition of 'state' on page 1, the author has ignored the context surrounding the concept of state as well as its place in the arguments of the book as a whole.

The author suggests she borrowed Scott's sense of legibilty in her own term to suggest that legibilty has some benefits; that she can easily determine the effects of the failure of a single leg of an argument on the whole and she can easily 'spot check' to determine is some fact is true or false. But in her application of this concept, especially the section on "Against the Grain," she demonstrates primarily that her approach is causing her to miss nuance, trip over ambiguity, and ignore context. Ironically, this is the exact critique Scott presents of legibility in his other work.

Kindness in argumentation means caring more about the right solution than winning. Unfortunately I have to deal with a lot of people who really only want to win, or who will change their basis of argument in order to win, even if it means espousing the view they initially opposed, as if it was their core line of reasoning!

I also deal with people who are only there for the argument. Being devils advocate is a sport for some.

This is orthogonal to the author's point. E.g., people who only want to win can make use of epistemic legibility to make their wins clear to themselves and/or others. People who change their core line of reasoning can opportunistically switch between two epistemic legible points.

If in either case the speaker doesn't use what the author calls epistemic legibility, then it is difficult to tell what the speaker means.

What I call "Legalistic" argument is the form which allows two oppositional basis of reasoning to be used simultaneously because any reason to invalidate the case at hand is acceptable, even if contradictory. Working with ex lawyers, debate team members and legal degree graduates I get this a lot. Also programmers. Well, not the ones who do numerical algorithms, they're used to floating point rounding error.

I think the fundamental problem can also be cast as the problem of language. A word like "few" is a classic example of an undefined value which is interpreted differently by people. To me, a few has to be below 2% to be disregardable. To others, closer to 10%. In numbers less than ten, a few can mean almost half to some people because three, is a "few" of ten and they forget how close 3 is to 4. This also hinges on "almost" and "nearly"

An epistemic line of reasoning would presumably state its basis to approximation?