Amaleq13

No, I consider DNA evidence to be conclusive and direct evidence.

ericmurphy

How is it direct evidence? DNA had nothing to do with the murder itself, and certainly didn't cause the murder.

Are you defining direct evidence as "evidence which is conclusive"?

Is the CMB "direct" or "circumstantial" evidence for cosmic inflation?

Amaleq13

It provides a direct identification requiring no inference.

I think I've already indicated that "circumstantial" doesn't seem to me appropriate for evidence that fulfills a prediction.

ericmurphy

It provides direct evidence that a particular sample of blood belongs to a particular person. Is it direct evidence that that person committed the crime? Or does it just place him or her at the scene, requiring inference that he or she actually committed the crime? There are lots of reasons someone's blood could be found near a body, especially if it's someone's who knew the victim.

But the CMB was discovered by people who had no idea it had anything to do with the Big Bang, and long before cosmic inflation even existed as an hypothesis. So did the CMB start out as being circumstantial evidence (for what, exactly?), but only later became direct evidence? That seems implausible to me.

Would the evidence for the theropod dinosaur ancestry of birds be direct evidence merely because someone predicted that birds are descended from dinosaurs? Would it become circumstantial evidence if it was believed that birds were actually descended from lizards?

This is beginning to sound like evidence is "direct" if it fulfills a prediction, but "circumstantial" if it doesn't. That can't be what you mean.

Amaleq13

Yes. That's what I'm saying.

Obviously not.

No. I'm suggesting that evidence which fulfills a specific prediction has greater weight, with regard to supporting a theory, than "merely" circumstantial evidence.

ericmurphy

So, since DNA evidence has been used to exonerate accused murderers, and such evidence is circumstantial evidence, not direct evidence, then circumstantial evidence has been used to set accused murders free.

That's begging the question. Whether or not a piece of evidence confirms a prediction is not a criterion by which evidence is direct or circumstantial.

The CMB is both circumstantial and confirms a prediction. Right? Wasn't it always circumstantial? It doesn't suddenly become direct evidence once it confirms a prediction, right?

Amaleq13

I was thinking of rape cases. DNA evidence provides a direct identification of the rapist.

No, it is denying a false dichotomy by suggesting the two extremes fail to adequately describe evidence which fulfills a specific prediction.

This is getting us further from relevance to the original issue.

Written records provide direct evidence as to the use of certain objects which is absent for preliterate societies. Conclusions about those societies are necessarily based upon indirect or circumstantial evidence and, depending on the amount, tend to be speculative in nature.

The archaeologists in the article clearly are speculating based upon the available circumstantial evidence.

More circumstantial evidence would increase the confidence with which they offered a conclusion (ie less speculative, more firm).

Evidence confirming a specific prediction would increase the confidence with which they offered a conclusion (ie less speculative, more firm).

We have a continuum from "guessing absent any evidence" to "conclusive direct evidence" with varying degrees of probability between.

ericmurphy

I don't really have anything to disagree with that you've written here. But I do disagree with a point you appeared to be making earlier: that conclusions based on circumstantial evidence are necessarily speculative. That's the part I disagree with.

There is certainly a continuum stretching from "rank speculation based on no evidence" to "conclusion based on such a volume of supporting evidence as to be generally accepted as fact." I just think that use of the term "speculation" should be confined further to the former side of that continuum.

Amaleq13

I agree that it is closer to the former than the latter but it should not be confused with the former.

Hex

Nope. Cultic doesn't -necessarily- need to be religious. I tried to make that clear above. The religious stuff about the chalk figurine comes from more than just the object and where it was found. The patterning of the 'how and where of the chamber' and the niche and the shape/style of the figurine, all in the greater context is why the 'potential' religious affiliation.

And, how do we -know- that a statue of an old man with 'Jupiter' scratched on the bottom -actually- represents the Roman deity? We don't. We -infer-, because we weren't actually there to witness it's creation/interrogate it's maker for actual intent.

How can I make such an assertion doubting the intent of the maker is there's (what some people consider sacred) text on the statue? If the statue were on the borders of Roman territory in Britain, mightn't some Celt, finding a figurine, have made a copy (text and all) without knowing the Roman deity at all, but knowing it meant something to those guys with the swords? :huh:

Or not. Let me, for a moment, focus on Teotihuacan (the Mexican city with the massive pyramids -in- it, called the 'Pyramid of the Sun' and 'Pyramid of the Moon') as an archaeological example. Up until ~2000 AD, their murals were recognized as representitive artworks, rather than holding non-Olmec style glyphs, as the modern understanding. But, since the 1960's, it has been known that, through the production and distribution of iconic figurines at Teotihuacan to many other pre-Toltec cities througout the Valley and to the coast, backed by elaborate trading networks and similarities at the cities, that Teotihuacan was the central place of power, run by the 'priests' and held together by the common religion.

Studies on the 'ideology of work' in Teotihuacan have been done (Ideology and Work at Teotihuacan: A Hermeneutic Interpretation, by Donald V. Kurtz; Mary Christopher Nunley
Man © 1993 Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (pp 761-778) in addition to the works on religion and religious impact on control, all before the 'writing' of the Teo peoples were discovered. Please note - While later Toltec and Aztec rulers/aristocrats plundered the site of Teotihuacan in order to appropriate images of past power, we're finding that more and more, they put their own meaning onto the objects than the original makers/consumers did.


And, I apologize. I don't know how much more I can get into in the treatment of 'religious' versus 'non-religious' than pointing back to the context, not just of single items, but suites of them, including their spatial relationship to each other within a site, between sites, and between clusters of sites.

Ahh, then why didn't you pose some sort of, well, question, say 'This doesn't seem to answer my question about ...' or 'To me this seems incomplete on the subject of ...' rather than simply trying to dissect a small bit of a report and make that a conclusive arguement to show that you win? :huh:

No. Not from 'written texts' only. People do, and have, treated their religions' special places and items in similar ways to keep them safe and special. Sure, they don't all make chambers under the ground to keep figurines in, but they all do -something special- with them, thus forming their own pattern. Literacy or not. True, many of our cultural analogies come from existing/recorded cultures, but these are used with care and carefully noted. And none of them are a 'simple template'.

Lack of data? What, you want something written that we can then question the veracity of or the bias of the author? Please.

I'd be happier with the 'hard evidence' of artifacts versus a mere description of them in some text. Look at the debate over the 'veracity' of the Christian New Testament, for example. Which one of the ressurections stories is the right one? Should be simple, because it's written down, right?

Don't get me wrong, archaeologists don't automatically throw texts away, but please realize, artifacts trump texts. Just as, in a trial, evidence trumps heresay.

Right. We can.

And, you can't argue that it does so through a public expression of intent and comitment to some thing, can you?

Right. And you don't expect me, even though some people call me 'Doctor', to give you a diagnosis on an illness, do you? Yet you trust your physician?

Seriously, I threw up the 'Moon Landing' stuff, because you were saying that you couldn't beleive the archaeological interpretation of the information. I'm not appealing to authority, but rather to how critical you're being about this one specific subject and how much you can 'know'. It's simple, at least to me.

All I'm really saying, is that when it comes to archaeology, go to an archaeologist. You want to dig for oil, get a geologist. You want to go into space, make sure your rocket was designed and built by folks in the aerospace/ergonomics/life support fields. Specialists in a field are such because of their knowledge and understanding of same.

Feel free to 'smile'. Archaeology will continue to build it's evidenciary, knowledge and synthetic cultural base in spite of you.

Nope, but you condescending treatment certainly helped in that line. And, as I said, feel free to continue to be obstenant. It is absolutely your right.

Well, again, don't get into archaeology, biology, history, economics, or any other of the 'predictive' sciences either then. They're not 100% certain about the outcomes of future events.

But then again, as certain as our chemistry and physics are concerned, their hypotheses (explainations of the data) change too.

Do we still understand gravity in that nice, solid Newtonian way?

If you want 100% correct facts everywhere, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.


- Hex


PS: Why is it that in that stuff you 'clipped' as insulting you included all the stuff on what CONTEXT the information was from? Didn't that stuff help to point out -why- the archaeological interpretation was made as it was? Just wondering.