[quote="Ashcroft Burnham":wto7oxfa]only a person [i:wto7oxfa]with[/i:wto7oxfa] legal skill and understanding can judge whether another person has it;[/quote:wto7oxfa]
So, I have been thinking a *lot* about the logical implications of this statement. There's a bootstapping problem here; if only a person with legal skill and understanding can judge whether a person has it; how do we find the *first* person who has legal skill and understanding?
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Ok, I'm not a logician here, nor an expert in the English language, so I'm not sure how exactly the implication goes; so let's try all of them!
I. The implication goes one way!
* if X has legal expertise then X can judge whether another person has legal expertise
* ( X has legal expertise --> X can judge whether Y has legal expertise)
First, this statement can be shown to be false if we find a single instance where X has legal expertise, but X shows poor judgement in whether a person has legal expertise.
But wait! If we're not in the set of people that has legal expertise, can we still judge if Y has legal expertise? The answer is: yes, it is possible! If we take the implication this way, it does not say *anything* about whether non-legal experts can judge the legal expertise of other people.
II. The implication goes the other way!
X can judge whether Y has legal expertise --> X has legal expertise
This doesnt tell us whether some Z can judge legal expertise. In fact, if we take the implication this way, there may be *some* legal experts who are *not* qualified to judge whether others are also legal experts!
III. The implication goes both ways!
X can judge whether Y has legal expertise <--> X has legal expertise
Or put it another way, the set of legal experts is the same as the set of people who can judge who is a legal expert. The implications of this statement is very interesting. First, the bootstrap problem above, we need to be able to find at least one person in this set to be able to find all the other people in that set. But wait, if we are not in that set, we're not qualified to judge that.
Are you confused? Me too!
Then there is this question, if we all agreed that one set of people are the legal experts (who are the same as the people who can qualify as the legal experts), what if two people in that set disagree?
Huh? Ok, lets say we start with this assumption
A is a legal expert
B is a legal expert
A judges C to be a legal expert
B judges C to be *not* a legal expert
well there are two possible cases: C is either a legal expert or not, let's take them one at a time.
Assume C is a legal expert
Then B judged wrongly about C.
Then we conclude that B *cannot* judge the qualifications of C
But we assumed that B is a legal expert! There is a contradiction.
Assume C is *not* a legal expert
Then A judged wrongly about C, therefore not a legal expert.
But we also assumed that A is a legal expert! There is a contradiction again in this case.
So we know that A and B cannot be both legal experts. But now the question arises, who do we believe, how can we tell which of A or B is a legal expert? The problem is, if we're not legal experts, we cannot know!
Oh noes!!! What does this mean?
Well, if we take Ashcroft's assertion as a double-implication, a lot of things; but here's one:
If there is a group that claim to be legal experts, non-experts are not qualified to determine if they are in fact, a group of experts.