Reply #121: (shrug) You place your bets, I'll place mine...

[BlooInBloo]

... on statements put out or leaked or fanned by the administration - I'll be happy to find out which of us comes out ahead.

It's not a cop-out to disbelieve - presumptively - a known liar - in a situation that is advantageous for the liar to lie - it's just having good sense.

But again - that's a reason. Whether that reason sways you is your own business.

It is cute tho how you attempt to get around the simple error by classifying it as a "cop out". Yah - and I guess not believing perjured witness because they perjured themselves is also a reasonless cop-out - LOL!

The fact that the speaker is a liar is a *reason*, not a cop-out, for presumptively disbelieving the liar. Again, what you do with that reason is up to you. It seems odd to me, though, to think there's anything at all odd about *other* people being skeptical of what a liar says, on topics he's been known to repeatedly lie about in the past, and in situations within which he's been known to lie.

Oh yah - I forgot - they're just all individual instances to you. Not members of a group of related instances (or "pattern of behavior" as a different jargon goes). It would indeed be hard to ever make any inferences if all we had were group-less individual instances. Hume rendered that point smashingly.