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Comment by mildavw | Hacker News Reader

A young missionary spends several decades living among and learning the language of a remote Amazon tribe.

He finds that his interest in languages and linguistics exceeds that of spreading Christianity and makes a career change.

Then, either

A) He realizes that he’s the only one who speaks this language and concocts a scheme to seek fame and fortune by falsely claiming it contradicts the leading theory of linguistics because no one can prove him wrong. Mwahaha!

B) As he learns about linguistic theories, he realizes that the language he learned as a missionary contradicts the leading theory of linguistics. This is academically interesting, so he writes a paper and gives talks describing what he found.

While A is certainly possible, it seems B is more likely.

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Is there a term for this sort of fallacious argument? It's based on "either this person is a liar or what they're saying must be true". The third, not mentioned possibility, is that a person can fool themselves.

And if you're talking the scientific investigation of complex phenomena like language, fooling one's self is common. Indeed, unless a researcher is using tremendous care, their chance of at least partly fooling themselves is very high.

Scientific processes and checks and balances exist because of this. That Everett essentially ignored these and primarily argued his case in the press leads me being very dubious of him. But this still doesn't he's a "liar", that he believes what he claims is plausible but doesn't change anything else.

It is known as a false dichotomy, and it is extremely common.

A true dichotomy would be more along the lines of: he is right or he is wrong.

Of course all possibilities subdivide, if he is wrong he is knowingly wrong and a liar or he made mistakes and too grandiose claims. Even if he is right, he could be right for the wrong reasons: his conclusions could be unsupported by his premises & evidence but still correct.

It's like the "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" argument used by the likes of C.S. Lewis to argue that Jesus Christ is, in fact, the son of God or otherwise just terrible all-around.

I remember growing up as an Evangelical Christian, I felt this argument was pretty decent. But eventually I came to realize that the argument hinges on the assumption that you can't be both a 'lunatic' in one part of your life, and functional or even an admirable person in other parts of your life.

Which of course is a silly assumption. The world is filled with genius crackpots, do-gooders who sucked in other parts of life, or people who are highly successful in one area and utter failures in other areas.

Yes, that Lewis argument immediately came to mind.

It's notable also the way Lewis cites honest people attesting to miracles, with again the false dichotomy that either the miracles happened as they described or the people were liars, when we have already a multitude of examples of honest, intelligent people thinking they've seen something that they haven't.

Yeah, I hear ya... of course there are degrees of in-between. In the article and the comments here, however, the tone of the criticisms of this guy and his ideas (e.g. "managed a few good years of self-promotion") seem weirdly personal and harsh.

That may be my bias as a very casual reader who isn't particularly invested in linguistic theories. (I certainly like Chomsky's social/political criticisms.)

C) His desire to prove something new leads him to overstate / overemphasise / mislead himself on degrees of difference.

Yep, a somewhat related example is how statistical analysis of Mendel's seed data [1] revealed that some bias crept in because its too perfect. In Mendel's case he was right about the genetics of inheritance (and the bias likely unconscious), which goes to show even when we're dedicated to the truth our capacity for self-deception exists.

[1] http://blog.thegrandlocus.com/2016/04/did-mendel-fake-his-re...

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