mikegarmin4 wrote:
The 1789 and 1840 examples are not congruent to the gay marriage debate as they were questions of democratic process, not judicial review, which is what's going on today at SCOTUS. The 1967 example was a direct violation of the equal protection clause and was a no-brainer, IMO. The EP clause, a result of democratic process, was to prevent discrimination against blacks. The law at question in Loving v Virginia was a direct violation of the EP clause.All three examples were directly relevant to the argument you presented, because they all (like your argument) are based on the same epistemological fallacy: assuming that concepts (in this case, the concepts of "marriage," "voting," and "government") are fixed in such a way that they can never subsume instances that differ in any respect from the instances one has encountered in the past.
Although the instances of a valid concept need to be distinguished from whatever is outside the concept by some difference in kind, it does not follow that there can be no differences in kind among the concept's instances. In particular, it does not follow that one cannot encounter new instances for a concept that differ in some way from those in one's past experience. If you've only seen white swans in the past, that doesn't preclude you from understanding that the black bird you just spotted is a swan.
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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
Which is probably why I was registering 59.67mi as I rolled into T2.
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Eppur si muove: Mar 26, 13 11:37