Appeal: dodge
From HEATED DEBATE: Jay Dyer Vs Jake Muslim Metaphysician | Trinity Vs Tawhid -Modern Day Debate.
- #6821:08:32overturned Jay Dyer psogos: dodge (+2)
The council overturned the call, so no points were given away.
“Does he say that the divine essence is a universal? You're equivocating on the term universal.”
Diogenes: Asked twice a plain question about what a text he was handed actually says, Dyer repeats the equivocation charge without ever saying yes or no; the distinction he wants to draw could have been given after the answer rather than instead of it. [Diarization merges the speakers here; the reply is Dyer's.]- Aristotle overturn: On the record: Jay's opening and later cross-exam (e.g., 61:48, 127:52 on Maximus/created universals) held consistently that "universal" is used by the Cappadocians loosely for "common" while his own critique targets the technical/created sense of universal; moments before this exchange he had already given that full distinction in response to the same Branson quote, so the repeated "you're equivocating" is shorthand for an answer already on the record, not a fresh refusal. A dodge requires the question to go genuinely unanswered; here Dyer had, immediately prior to the yes/no demand, explained that Branson/Cross's "universal" is the Cappadocian sense of "common" while what matters for the debate is the created/technical sense he denies applies to God's essence — he names the presupposition being conflated and what must be settled first, which is a distinguo/framework objection rather than a bare refusal to engage.
- Socrates uphold: Read blind, found "dodge". Jake asks a plain factual question twice, whether Branson's own dissertation (as quoted) calls the divine essence a universal, and Jay twice answers only "you're equivocating on the term universal" without saying yes or no or specifying, in that reply, which two senses are being conflated or which must be settled first.
- Plato overturn: On the record: S2's position, stated in the rebuttal immediately preceding this cross-examination (61:48: "we don't... think that the essence of God is a universal... this is a fundamental mistake... the essence of God itself is not actually a universal in the sense of the way that we understand universal"), already drew the distinction between the Cappadocians' looser "common" usage and the strict technical sense of universal at stake; the cross-exam refusal to reduce that distinction to a bare yes/no is a callback to a position already on the record, not a fresh evasion. Read against the whole debate rather than only the local exchange, the question Jake presses here had, in substance, already been answered moments earlier in Jay's own rebuttal, where he explicitly denied that the divine essence is a universal in the sense doing work in Jake's argument while granting a looser Cappadocian sense of "common"; repeating "you're equivocating" is pointing back to that distinction rather than a bare refusal to engage, so this is a distinguo/framework objection rather than a dodge.
- Thesmothetes overturn: By the rule: framework objection is not a dodge. Immediately before the quoted exchange, in the very same cross-examination answer, Dyer had already named the presupposition he denied and said what had to be settled: "what's relevant for our debate... is not whether God's essence is common, but whether there are created universals" — a distinguo between the Cappadocians' loose sense of "common"/"universal" and the technical created-universal sense his metaphysic rejects for God's essence, a distinction he had also laid out at length moments earlier in his rebuttal (61:48, citing Maximus that universals are created). Jake's "yes or no" demand assumed a single univocal sense of "universal," which is exactly the presupposition Dyer had just identified and rejected with reasons; "you're equivocating" is a compressed callback to that already-stated framework objection, not a fresh refusal to engage, so it fails the definition of a dodge.
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