authenticating Real Life(tm) - rhetorical bogosity

[Tom]

"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.