Defeasibility in Intellectual Positions
There are two things I expect from everybody when they espouse their positions or opinions: 1) Internal consistency, and 2) defeasibility.
I take it that what I mean by "1" is apparent. What I mean by "2" is that some combination of facts must be able to show your opinions to be false. If you have an infinitely flexible position so that it can absorb whatever the facts are your opinion is worse than wrong, it is vacuous piffle.
A good, current, real-world example of when your opinion lacks defeasibility is the controversy surrounding the experimental Ebola drugs, and the liberal idea that all Western interaction with the third and developing world is racist, imperialist, or colonial. The first thing to member is that the drugs are experimental (including even if it is serum). It is only because of the severity of this Ebola outbreak that the normal ethical concerns been curbed. So, if we give the drugs first to American doctors that have been infected trying to fight the outbreak in Africa, then the West is racist letting Africans die, because we are keeping all the medicine for our selves. This opinion has even been espoused by Jon Stewart on Aug 5th's Daily Show. Now, if we give the drugs to the Africans first the West is just using poor brown people to test their experimental drugs on instead of risking their own. I mean who cares if they die, or develop nasty side effects they are just human refuse, right? The Salon headlines write themselves; white people get ERBs and brown people are treated like lab rats.
To have an outcome and its negation both result in your narrative being correct means your narrative has no explanatory power. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
