Appeal: misrepresentation
From DEBATE: TRENT HORN VS. JAY DYER: SHOULD CHRISTIANS ACCEPT NATURAL THEOLOGY?.
- #86338:49tied, awaiting the moderator Jay Dyer psogos: misrepresentation (+1)
The council is split: nothing counts until the moderator decides.
“Trent is acting like there's no been no development or no no questions that are relevant that have been asked since the ancient and medieval world.”
Diogenes: Trent had just engaged a modern epistemological objection explicitly, distinguishing Aquinas from Lockean empiricism and citing De Veritate, so the charge that he ignores post-medieval questions overstates what was said.- Aristotle overturn: On the record: Jay declared from the opening that Trent's natural theology assumes unexamined modern-epistemology-relevant presuppositions (referent theory, paradigm-level questions) that the ancient/medieval sources cannot settle, and has held this line throughout; the quoted remark restates that standing critique rather than misattributing any specific claim to Trent. Jay's opening and continuing framework is that Trent's natural theology rests on unexamined post-Kantian/post-linguistic-turn presuppositions (referent theory, quantifier-shift, rigid designators, paradigm-level "metalogical" questions) that ancient/medieval writers never had to answer. At 38:49 he is mid-argument on exactly this referent/rigid-designator point (Cappadocians, monotheia vs monarchia, Vico, linguistic philosophy), which Trent had not yet addressed at all by that point in the transcript — Trent's only prior "modern epistemology" engagement (the De Veritate/Stanford Encyclopedia reply distinguishing Aquinas from Lockean empiricism) answered a different objection (the peripatetic axiom/empiricism charge), not the referent-theory charge on the table here. So the referee's basis for finding misrepresentation conflates two distinct objections. Misrepresentation requires attributing to the opponent a specific statement the transcript shows he did not make; Jay's line is instead a broad rhetorical characterization of Trent's overall posture, embedded in ongoing argument rather than substituting for one, and is not clearly false given what Trent had and had not yet addressed on this specific point — so even judged as a jab it fails the ad hominem tests (relevant, not a substitute, not baldly unsupported) rather than qualifying as misrepresentation.
- Socrates overturn: Read blind, found nothing worth calling. This is a rhetorical jab attached to a live argument, not a substitute for one: it comes embedded in Jay's ongoing rigid/flaccid-designator critique of Trent's patristic quotations, immediately followed by Jay pressing the actual substantive point ("that's precisely the type of question that I'm asking... that's what the Gariepy paper critiques"). It bears on relevance (Trent's method of citing ancient/patristic sources without engaging modern referent-theory objections) and is not offered to close the question but to invite further engagement, so it fails the tests for ad hominem and is better read as color on a completed point.
- Plato uphold: On the record: Trent's opening and prior rebuttal drew on both patristic sources and explicit modern scholarship (SEP, Andrew Moore, Thomas Torrance) and directly engaged a modern epistemological objection (the empiricism/peripatetic-axiom critique, distinguishing Aquinas from Lockean empiricism); Jay's blanket claim that Trent is "acting like there's...no questions relevant...since the ancient and medieval world" overstates this, even though the specific referent/rigid-designator point Jay raises here (Vico, linguistic philosophy) had not yet been addressed by Trent at this point in the debate. The referee's specific justification points to the wrong passage (the empiricism/De Veritate exchange, which is not what Jay is discussing here), but the underlying call is still defensible on the actual context: Trent's opening repeatedly cited modern academic sources and engaged modern objections, so Jay's generalized claim that Trent treats the ancient/medieval world as having no relevant subsequent questions is an overstatement of what the transcript shows, warranting a minor misrepresentation charge rather than a clean, accurate characterization of Trent's approach.
- Thesmothetes leave: "Misrepresentation" is the fault label the referee applied, not itself one of the written rules on offer, and no listed rule cleanly settles whether Jay's general remark about Trent ignoring post-medieval questions is falsified by the record. The judges disagree only on a genuine question of fact-reading: whether Trent's earlier SEP/De Veritate answer to the empiricism charge (a different sub-objection than the referent-theory point Jay was mid-argument on) is close enough to what Jay's blanket phrase covers to make it false. That is a judgment call for the archon, not something any of the enumerated rules decides.
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