I think this might be more interesting for me if I knew who "the Rationalists" are/were or if I'd ever seen anyone make the point you are arguing against.
Most of the people I know are irrationalists.
You can see that there is no Truth by means of sorites. Start from a clear case of HIV and change one base pair at a time. Exactly when does it cease to be HIV?
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Which is an interesting example, because HIV reverse transcriptase is very error-prone. 1-10 base pairs of 10k are switched every copy rna > dna
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Yes; which is part of how it evades immune surveillance; and also part of the reason “HIV” is not one virus, but a diverse family thereof
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So either HIV is not binary, or it is just an ambiguous word, depending on how things are formally defined (which I don't expect biologists to bother doing). I study programming languages and logics, so I don't expect informal language to have precise meaning.
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Science is dissimilar to programming and mathematics. Almost nothing in science is perfectly well-defined. It is infeasible to do so.
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