"Carskadden, Rush" wrote:
From a rhetorical standpoint, this argument is completely bogus. If you want to be reckless with logic, then you might be able to say that in a perfect world, trust of the proof may result in implicit trust of that's proof's application to an ideal (though this is technically flawed), but the trust is not transitive, nor commutative. Trust of a proof may result in trust of a proven concept, but the two are not indistinguishable.
that is a good point, but I am not quite convinced. let's first say that of course a proof does not create trust in anything but the subject of it. so if I prove that I am me that means you can trust THAT part of my words, but not necessarily anything else.
Further, the colloquial connotation of the word trust, which seems to me to be the major rhetorical nightmare here, appears subjective, and thus hard as hell to do anything with from a logical standpoint.
yes, we should really define the words we are using first.