Vorkosigan

Yes, I remember that. It foundered on several issues, though, as I recall. It was a 17 century writer who wrote letters to his daughter?

Michael

Vorkosigan

Rick, you're confusing two different statements:

• All conclusions of scholarly work contain an element of subjectivity.
  
  All conclusions are subjective.

Worse, your position appears to argue that our subjectivities are essentially incommensurable, whereas in fact they have considerable overlap, one reason we spend so much time debating them.

Like it or not, the data and methodology set boundaries for the debates and place limits on what our "preconceptions" can decide. Our assessments have an element of subjectivity but they are not only subjectivity.

The fact is that your "argument from subjectivity" has an answer, and that is the intersubjectivity of all of us here who care about the answers to these questions. Helen Longino put it very nicely:

"Only if the products of inquiry are understood to be formed by the kind of critical discussion that is possible among a plurality of individuals about a commonly accessible phenomenon, can we see how they count as knowledge rather than opinion.
Objectivity, then, is a characteristic of a community's practice of science rather than of an individual's....."(Science as Social Knowledge (or via: amazon.co.uk) p74).

If you wish to position yourself in the middle, find a meaningful position there, not one that starts by declaring a plague on both houses and ends by declaring a plague on all scholarship.

Yes, and if it was only relevant that Earl's point be quantifiable, you'd actually be saying something here. And what, do you really believe that if Earl could quantify his point, it would be less "subjective?"

It is completely irrelevant whether it can be "quantified." If Earl came back and told you that Paul's silence was significant at the p<.05 level, you'd tell him that it was still too high and too subjective. If he came back at you with an SEM, you'd complain that the relationships among the constructs are conjecture. If he nailed you with a canonical correlation, you'd say that at best all he shown is a vage correlation between the variates. Factor analysis? The loadings are too low, and what about those variables that loaded on to two factors, Earl? Regardless of what analysis he used, you'd find his r squared too low for your taste.

In any research, the methodology is always the weakest part. It's the nature of the beast. Earl knows there is an element of subjectivity to his work. So does everyone else.

Time to move along and make productive arguments.

Michael

gstafleu

I think you should change "Every poster on this board who rejects..." To "Some posters on this board who reject...".

Gerard Stafleu

krosero

[QUOTE=Vorkosigan;4593050]I do have to agree with this. It might be too drastic as a description of what Rick is saying, but I'll let Rick clarify that. At least I do agree, Vork, with your general principle here.

Rick Sumner

That they have overlap does not mean that they are commensurable. It means that people think in certain ways. Let me give an example of this one:

A group of marauders asks you for directions. You have one of two choices: Point them to a village of fifty, or point them down another road to a lone man. The response people have to this is so consistent, across cultures, that we could call it universal. You kill the one to save the fifty. Do the objective numbers make it an objective thought process? You might think so.

Let's tweak the settings a little. The Hawkeye Pierce dilemma. Kill an infant to save a busload. Still one to fifty. We start to struggle here. Studies have been done on this particular dilemma (using both examples) such that you can actually see what happens to the brain. The objective, commensurable truth is the same in both--one life for fifty. But we subjectively attach more significance to the life of an infant than we do to the life of an adult. There is tremendous--near universal--overlap between people on this. But the actual weight ascribed to either across people is, at least by present mechanisms, incommensurable. It is the same beast here--the weight we attach to what we "should expect" from Paul cannot be measured.

So the objective facts--50 to 1--remain the same, the subjective weights don't. And those weights are incommensurable.

I believe I said as much. Explicitly, in fact, with my analogy to economic systems, and again above.

Thank you for the quote, and I've actually just ordered this book, which I'll read in the near future. Unfortunately, this appeal doesn't work as well when things are so hotly contested. Is it knowledge or opinion that we should expect Paul to say such and such at such and such a point?

If it is plurality that makes opinion into knowledge, as you suggest, Earl seems to be on the wrong side of that plurality.

If you think I've declared a plague on either, you've missed my point. I think that such subjectivity is to be encouraged, and indeed I love the debate as much as the next--the contentiousness it accords me is, like many here I'm sure, part of the reason I enjoy the fields that I do. It is not that I think such subjectivity should be rejected, it's that I think it should be recognized, and very seldom is.

It is not that I think the subjectivity is bankrupt in assessing the worth of either position, it's that I think it's bankrupt in determining objective truths. It's that I think Earl is unjustified in declaring his position "unlikely," and waxing about the closed-mindedness of those unpersuaded, as though he had some quantifiable, objective claim to what is being said.

Is such a position meaningful? Our own Joel Ng used to call it "historical anti-realism," which is as good a term as any, and probably better than most. The difference, of course, is that I'm prepared to embrace such subjectivity once recognized, while Joel wasn't. Perhaps I just love the debate more. The position is, in essence, that history is objectively lost to us. That doesn't seem as meaningless to me as you seem to assess it as. But, of course, you've misunderstood it, as indicated above.

I've snipped the rest, because the essence of it is caught here. If Earl simply said "Paul is silent here, where he would be helped by. . ." that would work with what you're saying. But he didn't. He declared the silence "unlikely," and proceeded to declare that those he reached contrary conclusions were, in fact, ignoring the evidence, rather than embarking on the same subjective assessments he was. Such statements imply that his conclusions are objectively verifiable and falsifiable when they are in fact neither. We can agree that Earl has engaged in subjective analysis of the evidence, but then why does he treat his opponents as though they are ignoring objective truths?

That is, and always has been, my point.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

spamandham

Aren't such studies evidence that human behavior is predictable? What then is wrong about postulating Paul's position, and then testing the postulate by seeing whether Paul's behavior is consistent with it, under the assumption that Paul exhibited typical human behaviors?

I think you're getting at something here. It might be possible to identify key behaviors related to those who believe they are writing history, and those who believe they are not. Then, we might really be able to calculate a probability of what Paul believed. I'm not aware of any such system at present, but if it exists, it has the potential to settle the debate.

Rick Sumner

The problem I see with this is that it is Earl's position that it is mentioned, just not explicitly. The lack of explicit reference isn't a problem for him, because he sees Pauline mythicism as orthodoxy--it is the mainstream, and thus authors may not have felt the need to express it outright, anymore than I'd feel the need to point out that modern Christians accepted an historical Jesus if I mentioned them in a work.

This I agree with whole-heartedly. The problem with appeals to "common sense" in this context is two-fold. First of all, what people term common sense isn't terribly common (if it was, it wouldn't need to be appealed to at all). And thus Earl's idea of "common sense" is apparently different from his opponents.

Secondly, even on points we can agree are common sense, we run into the problem of anachronism. What seems "common sense" now, may not have seemed such to the ancient mind.

I think this is closer to objectivity than your other suggestion--comparison to other cults. For another analogy, I could assemble a sampling of the DSS that mention the "Teacher of Righteousness," but omit details we know of from other texts, and that do not put him in any historical context. If that sampling was all that survived, we might apply Earl's criteria, and walk away with the wrong conclusion.

But the problem with this is that same element of subjectivity. How important is it that the ToR be mentioned at a given point. Likewise, how much weight should we attach to whether Sai Baba should be mentioned.

And I find this point to be compelling. He also requires more sources for independent traditions to have circulated, allowing texts that seem to have gospel knowledge to, instead, have drawn from another, now lost, source. This multiplication of entities begins, by my math, with 2Peter, but compounds as we move through second century apologists.

It is here that I find Earl's AFS begins to fall apart: The second century apologists meet the criteria Earl applies to earlier texts, such as the Paulines. Because of that, he is forced to take them as mythicists, with no knowledge of the gospels, or see his argument reversed.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Rick Sumner

On the contrary. Some people won't kill the infant. Some people will. Such studies indicate that the more subjective something is, the less predictable they become.

Unfortunately, Asimov's Hari Seldon has not yet been born.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Loomis

I don’t think so. Have you read my earlier posts?

Be honest.

You should.

It looks to me like Paul was playing off of the vagueness of the ‘lord’ character in the Greek translation of his OT.

It looks to me like Paul didn’t know who the ‘lord’ was and was just making shit up.

It looks to me like Paul was just developing a character around a mysterious ‘lord’ in the OT that no one understood.

There is more evidence in Romans 10. Check it out:
Compare …
See?

The LORD is Yahweh.

Get a load of this:
Compare …
See?

The LORD is Yahweh.

Now this is where we can be sure his bible read ‘lord’ and not ‘Yahweh’. Look at what Paul says about the 'lord':
See?

This statement only makes sense if Paul understood ‘the LORD’ to mean ‘lord’ and nothing more. If you substitute the name Yahweh the verse is absurd:

See?

I doesn’t make sense.

Paul was just reading Greek translations of the OT and making shit up.

Paul never heard of Yahweh. His ancestors changed Yahweh to Lord in order to trick Paul, and they succeeded.

I might suggest that the prior name of this suffering servant was ‘Yahweh’.

spamandham

But almost everyone will point the marauders toward the lone man. Sure, expectations break down under extreme circumstances, but does that mean they are invalid under more ordinary circumstances? Are you really claiming that it isn't legitimate to gather insight into the mind of a writer from his writings?