Freethought & Rationalism Archive

J-D · 11-22-2011, 08:59 PM

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by Toto

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Everyone who has disagreed with you has been very specific.

At the same time they have also been quite vague on specific issues in question, namely the choice underlying the selection and formulation of postulatory statement that are to serve in representing the evidence items themselves in discussion. For example, the postulates you provided above for the issue related to the authenticity of "Paul", were shown to be vague and to be reduceable to the postulate "Paul was either a genuine historical character or maybe he wasn't." What do you expect to learn by employing this specific postulate aside from exercising vagueness?

Would you like to point out where I labeled that statement a postulate?

The exchange covers posts # 85, 87, 90, 91, 94, 95 and 100.

In the final post #100:

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Originally Posted by Toto

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When you write of the possibility that someone forged the letters of Paul above, you seem to treat Paul as an historical person. When I write of the possibility that "Paul" was forged, I do not necessarily assume that "Paul" was historical. I will allow as a possible postulate that "Paul" was just a fabricated name upon which to hang a host of epistles - that "Paul" may not have been a figure of history at all.

That is a third possibility -- that someone wrote letters and attributed them to a non-existent person.

All these possibilities are essentially possible postulates that people can make about one item of evidence - the pauline letters (nb: some people can examine each verse of these letters as separate items of evidence). There are obviously many more possibilities. Shesh adds one below.

You did not respond to this. You seem to be taking the position that these "possibilities" are NOT postulates, and I disagree with that position.

I think it is probably more nearly accurate to say that Toto is saying that those possibilities are not, in your words, 'essentially' postulates.

If "these possibilities" are not postulates or hypotheses then what are they?

Statements which people might possibly arrive at by simple postulation of them (although it's not recommended, for reasons of parsimony, as I previously mentioned) but which they might also arrive at in other ways.

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 09:12 PM

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by Toto

I do not think that the existence of Paul is a suitable subject for a postulate.

Why ever not?

For considerations of parsimony. Postulates should be minimised, which means they should be as generalised as possible.

You seem to be saying that because of parsimony we dont need to question the assumed truth of the postulate that "Paul" was a genuine and authentic historical figure. This is bullshit. Who gets to choose parsimony, Bugs Bunny or the Pope?

For considerations of critical thinking and analysis of our most primitive and long-held-on-faith-beliefs we are free to question whether or not we should accept as provisionally true the postulate that "Paul" was a genuine and authentic historical figure.

The existence of Paul is an emminently suitable subject for a postulate. But this becomes apparent only after one has identified that we had always held a default position - a default postulate - presented to us by the hegemonic parsimony, that could be questioned.

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Originally Posted by Toto

I do not think that the existence of Paul is a suitable subject for a postulate.

Do you not think the existence of Jesus is a suitable subject for a postulate.?

Do you not think the existence of Papias is a suitable subject for a postulate.?

Do you think that some evidence is unsuitable to make postulates about?

J-D · 11-22-2011, 09:26 PM

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by Toto

I do not think that the existence of Paul is a suitable subject for a postulate.

Why ever not?

For considerations of parsimony. Postulates should be minimised, which means they should be as generalised as possible.

You seem to be saying that because of parsimony we dont need to question the assumed truth of the postulate that "Paul" was a genuine and authentic historical figure.

No, I didn't say that. Toto said that the existence of Paul is not a suitable subject for a postulate, meaning that we should neither postulate it nor postulate the reverse. That is the parsimonious approach. If we want to investigate the existence of Paul we should do so not by simply directly postulating an answer to the question but by working with more generalised postulates (and, of course, whatever evidence we can find).

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 09:31 PM

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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You have made clear that you intend the two descriptions to be exclusive possibilities but you have not made clear whether you also intend them to be exhaustive.

What I have proposed is a postulate reserved for the expression of an assessment of historical authenticity. In respect of this attribute the descriptions are exhaustive in the simple case.

If X and Y are exclusive and exhaustive possibilities,

No. They are MUTUALLY exclusive and exhaustive possibilties.

If X and Y are MUTUALLY exclusive and exhaustive possibilities, then by definition their probabilities are not independent because by definition they must sum to 100%,

By definition only one is 100% correct.

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and the tabulation you should get might be something like this (instead of the hopelessly misconceived pig’s breakfast you produced):

(100%) X is definitely the case....................Y is definitely not the case (0%)
(95%) X is very highly likely to be the case....................There is little or no chance that Y is the case (5%)
(75%) X is probably the case....................Y is probably not the case (25%)
(55%) X is more likely than not to be the case....................It is more likely than not that Y is not the case (45%)
(50%) The chances that X is the case are about even....................The chances that Y is the case are about even (50%)
(45%) It is more likely than not that X is not the case....................Y is more likely than not to be the case (55%)
(25%) X is probably not the case....................Y is probably the case (75%)
(5%) There is little or no chance that X is the case....................Y is very highly likely to be the case (95%)
(0%) X is definitely not the case....................Y is definitely the case(100%)

An item of evidence can be ULTIMATELY considered to be either historically genuine or historically ingenuine (i.e. fabricated). It cannot be both at the same time. Therefore all your options between 0 and 100 can be scrapped as impossible, and you are left with the postulates labelled 100% and 0%. which is exactly the same as the CUT-DOWN version I provided somewhere above, with these two options listed together with the NULL option.

It is not clear whether you are talking about possibilities for what is the case or possibilities for what can be known/assumed.

I dont know what you mean with this question - you may need to paraphrase it.
But I'll take a guess at what you mean and answer with - both.

Well, what did you mean by referring to all my options between 0 and 100, and then to scrapping them as impossible? You were the one who dreamt up the idea of a scale of values running from 100 to 0 and then on to -100, with various intermediates. If you are now scrapping all those intermediates as impossible, why did you introduce them in the first place?

In order to introduce a grey scaling into something which in the cut-down version is basically either black or white.

That doesn't answer my question. If the intermediates are impossible, why did you ever introduce them?

The intermediates are you expressed them above are impossible because you are saying that something is both true and false at the same time.

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If they are not, why did you say they were?

The intermediates as I expressed them are consistent of antithetical pairs which can only be either true or false but not both.

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 09:34 PM

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Originally Posted by J-D

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You appear to have made the fallacy of confusing evidence and postulates about the evidence. Read the following and meditate upon the notion that Carrier is using the term theories as a synonym for the word hypotheses (and thus postulates). The evidence is mute. We author postulates of our own invention. These postulates are just basic statements about the silent evidence.

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Originally Posted by Richard Carrier

The Fallacy of Confusing Evidence with Theories:

A single example will suffice: William Lane Craig frequently argues that historians need to explain the evidence of the empty tomb. But in a Bayesian equation, the evidence is not the discovery of an empty tomb, but the production of a story about the discovery of an empty tomb. That there was an actual empty tomb is only a theory (a hypothesis, i.e. h) to explain the production of the story (which is an element of e). But this theory must be compared with other possible explanations of why that story came to exist (= ~h, or = h2, h3, etc.), and these must be compared on a total examination of the evidence (all elements of e, in conjunction with b and the resulting prior probabilities).

Hence a common mistake is to confuse actual hypotheses about the evidence, with the actual evidence itself (which should be tangible physical facts, i.e. actual surviving artifacts, documents, etc., and straightforward generalizations therefrom).

Carrier does not say that the evidence is mute.

Who makes the hypotheses (i.e h) about the evidence; the evidence or the investigator?

The investigator, obviously: why do you ask?

The fact that an investigator makes hypotheses does not mean that the evidence tells us nothing; to the contrary, when an investigator makes hypotheses, they are precisely hypotheses about what the evidence tells us.

Get 100 investigators and one item of evidence and we do not necessarily get one hypotheses, we sometimes get far more than a hundred.

Sometimes, possibly.

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Originally Posted by mountainman

If therefore the evidence is not mute, and is in direct communication with each investigator then it may obviously be saying entirely different statements to each of them.

Perhaps. But if the evidence tells different people different things, that is not the same as the evidence telling us nothing.

The evidence can in some cases tell some investigators nothing.

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 09:38 PM

Doug presents it as an hypothesis. In case you have not noticed the many dictionary citations by myself and others in thiis thread, I am accepting an equivalence between the two terms hypothesis and postulate.

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Doug presents a postulate for Paul at post # 217.

He does not present it as a postulate.

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Is this unsuitable?

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Originally Posted by Doug

I think it more likely that Paul really existed than that he did not exist.

That hypothesis, in my judgment, underlies the most parsimonious accounting of all the extant evidence relevant to the provenance of the documents generally referred to as the Pauline Corpus.

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 09:43 PM

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by Toto

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Everyone who has disagreed with you has been very specific.

At the same time they have also been quite vague on specific issues in question, namely the choice underlying the selection and formulation of postulatory statement that are to serve in representing the evidence items themselves in discussion. For example, the postulates you provided above for the issue related to the authenticity of "Paul", were shown to be vague and to be reduceable to the postulate "Paul was either a genuine historical character or maybe he wasn't." What do you expect to learn by employing this specific postulate aside from exercising vagueness?

Would you like to point out where I labeled that statement a postulate?

The exchange covers posts # 85, 87, 90, 91, 94, 95 and 100.

In the final post #100:

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Originally Posted by Toto

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When you write of the possibility that someone forged the letters of Paul above, you seem to treat Paul as an historical person. When I write of the possibility that "Paul" was forged, I do not necessarily assume that "Paul" was historical. I will allow as a possible postulate that "Paul" was just a fabricated name upon which to hang a host of epistles - that "Paul" may not have been a figure of history at all.

That is a third possibility -- that someone wrote letters and attributed them to a non-existent person.

All these possibilities are essentially possible postulates that people can make about one item of evidence - the pauline letters (nb: some people can examine each verse of these letters as separate items of evidence). There are obviously many more possibilities. Shesh adds one below.

You did not respond to this. You seem to be taking the position that these "possibilities" are NOT postulates, and I disagree with that position.

I think it is probably more nearly accurate to say that Toto is saying that those possibilities are not, in your words, 'essentially' postulates.

If "these possibilities" are not postulates or hypotheses then what are they?

Statements which people might possibly arrive at by simple postulation of them (although it's not recommended, for reasons of parsimony, as I previously mentioned)

This translates to the scenario in which we have statements derived from simple postulation that represent possibilities that you are reticent to describe as postulates. I see.

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but which they might also arrive at in other ways.

Such as?

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 09:48 PM

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by Toto

I do not think that the existence of Paul is a suitable subject for a postulate.

Why ever not?

For considerations of parsimony. Postulates should be minimised, which means they should be as generalised as possible.

You seem to be saying that because of parsimony we dont need to question the assumed truth of the postulate that "Paul" was a genuine and authentic historical figure.

No, I didn't say that. Toto said that the existence of Paul is not a suitable subject for a postulate, meaning that we should neither postulate it nor postulate the reverse.

Sort of like a transcendental truth?

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That is the parsimonious approach.

Thou shalt not postulate about that which is the subject of FAITH and already held to be TRUE?

J-D · 11-22-2011, 10:06 PM