Sophistry is not an argument either. I do hope you're paying Brimmer a residual, twice the going rate for the times you've misused his quip the past week or so.
What you refer to as 'anecdotal evidence' is quite useful for understanding and explaining the atypical, and there are many in need of enlightenment here, including myself. I cannot even decide what I should call what happened in the early morning hours some three years ago. 'Confession/accusation' is what I've been referring to it as, though I don't really think it was either a confession or an accusation.
Kevin Lowe has made an argument for an internalized false confession employing a breadth of methods, including--abbreviated for venue--multiple case studies. That's what 'anecdotal evidence' is called in fields where quantitative statistical analysis is insufficient. However in the end I am more interested in what it means, and how it happened, than defining what it was, being as all it seems to draw is more moles for him to whack. Thus for the meantime I'll stay along the lines of 'they put the screws to her and freaked the chick out.'
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It is not sophistry to point out that anecdotes are being used as a rhetorical
tactic, not as a part of a balanced and nuanced analysis.
Without some measure of comparative frequency quantitative statistical analysis is not merely insufficient in this usage, it is irrelevant. Not applicable at all. This does not even begin to address the subject of causality, in which it becomes necessary to articulate how a set of examples (anecdotes) somehow provide evidence that a relationship between those examples and other allegedly similar ones actually exists, and actually constitutes some basis to assume a causal relationship.
Kevin has not succeeded in such an endeavor. The additional cites by so many others of erroneous convictions have not either. A relentless parade of bad, scary stuff may, by some stretch of definition, constitute an argument, but it does not constitute a rational analysis. It is simply and starkly an appeal to emotion.
Even Matthew Best understands this, and he is arguing for the Knox defenders.
I fail to see what difference it would make. The fact of whether Knox's "confession" is false is unaffected by the number of other false confessions there may be.
And I agree with this statement.
My point is as simple as that.
Presented on its own, what we actually know about the Knox questioning does not provide us with enough data to draw the conclusion that she was coerced in any fashion beyond what would constitute standard law enforcement interview techniques generally acceptable even in the U.S. and U.K. Beyond that we have been offered hyperbole, distortion, and the insinuation and innuendo incited and bolstered by these anecdotes. Knox's own words, taken as a body and not scissored into conveniently manipulable bites, suggest that there was not any such brutal coercion.
The initial play on this meme was that she was held continuously for ~fifty hours without food, water, rest, or even sanitation. This did not withstand even casual scrutiny, and the vectors of the meme quickly (and repeatedly) retreated to presumably more defensible exaggeration. Argument by anecdote has become a new tactic of choice, but it no more defensible, just marginally less transparent.
The sad reality is that regardless of such clever verbal constructs as "internalized false confession", using only the facts at hand concerning her individual case, the simplest and thus (as has been often pointed out in these threads for many different reasons) most likely explanation is that Knox lied.
I am still open to conjecture as to why
she may have chosen to lie, but I am not convinced by the unrelated anecdotal arguments alluding to coercion. No matter how many of them are posted.
