Freethought & Rationalism Archive

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 03:09 AM

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Originally Posted by Toto

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by Toto

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.

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My main postulate was that human psychology operated about the same in the Biblical period as it does today.

That is a general postulate related to the conceptual framework, and you are entitled to make as many of these as you like. However it is MANDATORY that you also make postulates in regard to each and every item of evidence.

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

Why ever not? Is the existence (or non-existence) of Paul special in some way?

Doug presents a postulate for Paul at post # 217. Is this unsuitable?

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Originally Posted by Doug

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, 03:29 AM

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Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

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For example, is the following a fair summary?

I have no idea, because I cannot discern your intended meaning.

The intended meaning was to be able to uniquely specify your own preferred formulation of your own hypothesis (related to whether Paul is to be considered a genuine and authentic historical character) in a manner which is explicit when set alongside other competing hypotheses of other posters, theorists and investigators.

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.

It follows therefore, that if you were presented with the choice of using one of the following two hypotheses you would provisionally select the first:

Hypothesis (1): "Paul was a genuine and authentic historical character".

Hypothesis (-1): "Paul was NOT a genuine and authentic historical character"

It must therefore also follow that you would provisionally reject the second.

If you agree with the above, then it must follow that in your judgement the first hypothesis provisionally underlies the most parsimonious accounting of all the extant evidence relevant to the provenance of the documents generally referred to as the Pauline Corpus.

If you think it more likely that Paul really existed than that he did not exist, then your (provisional) postulate is simply and explicitly Hypothesis (1): "Paul was a genuine and authentic historical character".

The hypothesis that "Paul really existed more than that he did not exist" is far too vague. If all your hypotheses are vague, what is the point and what is the nature of the conclusion. BTW please do not think I am saying your hypothesis is wrong. I dont know!

I am not really concerned with estimating the truth value of the hypotheses, rather I am concerned with the precision and explicit nature and formulation of the statements that are to represent our hypotheses. I am interested in what you see your hypotheses are, and whether or not they are explicit, and whether they can be simplified, etc.

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 03:51 AM

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Originally Posted by J-D

The flaw in your reasoning is that ...

It is not a flaw. You are simply extending the list of evidence items. You are bringing in more detail to the question, which originally treated the "Pauline Letters" as one item of evidence. This is cool.

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you have not established what you are referring to when you use the name 'Paul'. Are you talking about a Paul who wrote 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians, Romans, and 1 Thessalonians, but did not write Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus? Or are you talking about a Paul who wrote Colossians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians, Romans, and 1 Thessalonians, and 2 Thessalonians, but did not write Hebrews, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus? Or are you talking about a Paul who wrote Colossians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philemon, Philippians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus but did not write Hebrews? Or are you talking about a Paul who wrote Colossians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Hebrews, Philemon, Philippians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus? Or what?

This is an excellent point. We have previously discussed the "Pauline Epistles" as one item of evidence, and this has led to a discussion on the various postulates related to the historical authenticity of "Paul". Of course, "Paul" is a second item of evidence, presumed to be related to the Pauline Letters.

There is absolutely nothing to prevent anyone introducing a set of 14 items of evidence that represent the 14 individual letters of "Paul: as they appear in the canon. Postulates will then have to made about each of these 14 items. The postulates could all be of the same nature, or they could vary from letter to letter.

Likewise there is also nothing to prevent anyone from citing each verse in every one of the Pauline letters as separate items of evidence. I dont know how many verses there are in the Pauline corpus, but it does not matter. One would need to make postulates about each one of these verses. The postulates could all be of the same nature, or they could vary from verse to verse. It may be that some people are prepared to argue that one or more such verses are not genuine in the letter, but represent a later interpolation, or a fabrication.

However many millions of evidence items are to be addressed is immaterial. The basic principle of examining an evidence item and formulating statements to be used as hypothetical truths for the sake of determining theoretical conclusions about the totality of the evidence items is the same process underlying all evidence.

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Toto · 11-22-2011, 08:21 AM

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Originally Posted by mountainman

...

You did not respond to this. ...

I didn't want to encourage you.

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... it is MANDATORY that you also make postulates in regard to each and every item of evidence.

No it's not. Where do you get this?

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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? Is the existence (or non-existence) of Paul special in some way?

I use the term postulate to mean an assumption or an axiom. If you use the term postulate to mean "hypothesis" your claims still don't make any sense.

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Doug presents a postulate for Paul at post # 217. Is this unsuitable?

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Originally Posted by Doug

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.

If you want to talk about hypotheses, use that term. We all know what it means. You have pulled two definitions of postulate out of the dictionary and confused them.

J-D · 11-22-2011, 09:21 AM

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Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

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Originally Posted by J-D

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Originally Posted by Doug Shaver

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I gather that you are suggesting that, in the case of the documents under discussion, the most probable reason for attributing their authorship to a 'Paul' is that, in the context in which the attribution was made, there was a well-known 'Paul' whose name would be taken as adding weight to any document attributed to his authorship.

Is that what you are saying? If so, then I have not yet seen you give a reason why you think this explanation more probable than any alternatives.

Yes, that is what I'm saying. My reason for assessing its probability as I do is that is it known to have happened in several other cases. Documents are known to have been written by obscure people claiming to be famous people, and the actual existence of those famous people is in most cases uncontested. I regard that as sufficient to establish Paul's existence as the default inference from the existence of documents attributed to him. Any alternative hypothesis, I would argue, requires additional evidence sufficient to undermine the default, i.e. we need some positive reason to think it unlikely that Paul existed notwithstanding that somebody used his name to add credibility to his writings.

I don't deny that Paul could have been a figment of early Christian imagination, but I have yet to see, from anybody in this forum or anywhere else, a cogent argument taking that proposition from "it's possible" to "it's probable."

From examples I know of, there are a number of reasons why people put names on texts.

And I have not disputed that.

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Originally Posted by J-D

Sometimes it’s done with the intention of identifying the author accurately, and this includes both cases where the identification is accurate and cases where a misunderstanding or garbling in transmission has produced a false attribution.

In such cases, the attributor -- the person making the identification -- must believe that the alleged author really existed. In those cases, if you claim there was no such person, then you must explain why the attributor thought there was.

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Originally Posted by J-D

Sometimes it’s done to create false associations, such as giving the text an unmerited air of authority, and this includes both cases where the person named as author really exists (or existed) and cases where the person named never really existed but is the subject of a widespread accepted belief (or, at least, acceptance of the belief was sufficiently widespread before the attribution was made for the attribution to have some effect).

Then all you have to explain is how, in Paul's case, he came to be regarded as authoritative without having actually existed.

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Originally Posted by J-D

Sometimes it’s done to disguise the identity of the author or some specific personal information (for example, gender).

We have some documents. Somebody had to write them. I'm not wedded to the proposition that Paul was his real name, but until somebody comes up with a better ID for the author, I don't see a problem with referring to him by the name he chose to use. It certainly does not commit me to believing even one word of anything that the author of Acts wrote about him.

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Originally Posted by J-D

Sometimes it’s done as a literary conceit (as, for example, in the case of the description of part of the first Sherlock Holmes story as an extract from the reminiscences of Dr Watson, in which case nobody intended or expected any reader to suppose that the Dr Watson referred to was a real person or that anybody thought he was).

That's an OK scenario for works of fiction. However, while I believe very little of what is in the Pauline corpus, I would not classify it as fiction.

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Originally Posted by J-D

There may be others I haven’t thought of, but in any case in what you have written here so far I don’t see sufficient evaluation of alternatives to support a conclusion about what the most likely explanation is in this case.

You now have my evaluation of the ones you did think of.

Thank you. I find that persuasive.

J-D · 11-22-2011, 09:27 AM

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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

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.

J-D · 11-22-2011, 09:40 AM

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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 J-D

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Originally Posted by J-D

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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?

mountainman · 11-22-2011, 03:47 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

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. 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.

The investigator(s) formulate and author specific hypotheses about the evidence before them, or alternatively they read the works of other investigators and simply use the earlier hypotheses of other investigators.

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Originally Posted by Toto

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Originally Posted by mountainman

... it is MANDATORY that you [THE INVESTIGATOR] also make postulates in regard to each and every item of evidence.

No it's not. Where do you get this?

Read the above in entirely and do not miss reading Carrier.

The investigator(s) formulate and author specific hypotheses about the evidence before them, or alternatively they read the works of other investigators and simply use the earlier hypotheses of other investigators.

In either case, they must represent their position on the nature of the detailed evidence as one or more hypothetical statements, to be assumed provisionally true for the purpose of exploring another more major hypothesis or theory.

Toto · 11-22-2011, 04:21 PM

I've read Carrier, and I know what he is talking about. You, on the other hand, have not said anything significant in this thread.

J-D · 11-22-2011, 04:30 PM

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Originally Posted by mountainman

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Adopting no postulate is not adopting a postulate.

The NULL postulate is valid and may be adopted. It is adopting the postulate that nothing can be said about the truth or the falsity of the issues about the evidence in this instance, and is a valid conclusion in some investigations.

You are confusing two different things: starting an investigation with no assumptions, and finishing an investigation with no conclusions.

The schematic disambiguates between postulates (assumptions) and conclusions. You are confusing two different things: the null postulate and the null conclusion.

No; you confused them first.

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11-22-2011, 04:21 PM	#229
Toto Contributor Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Los Angeles area Posts: 40,549	I've read Carrier, and I know what he is talking about. You, on the other hand, have not said anything significant in this thread.

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