Originally Posted by Solo

Not if you hide the 'alla ge humin eimi' that completes the sentence.

Originally Posted by Solo

Except Paul has just finished saying he is not recognized as an apostle outside of his own congregation.

Originally Posted by Solo

I was being sarcastic, LOM. Do you understand 'sarcasm' ? It is a way to attack a point that someone makes by circumlocution. I was commenting on the superfluous adjective "positive" slapped before "evidence" in your statement. There is no "positive", or for that matter "negative", evidence but plain-Jane "evidence" (and "evidence to the contrary"), that is if you want to make yourself understood among rational people writing English.

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

You might want to inform the rest of the academic world. Otherwise we will continue to see "irrational" publications like "Sexual differentiation of the zebra finch song system: Positive evidence, negative evidence, null hypotheses, and a paradigm shift" from the journal Developmental Neurobiology or papers on artificial learning which use the term in an even more specified manner (see, e.g., "Learning to recommend from positive evidence," a paper from the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces).

All that time I wasted reading monographs, papers, books, etc., on evidence and confirmation in general not to mention the works on what type of approach to which types of evidence are best in specific fields and all that wasted time studying logic, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of historiography, and all I had to do was realize it's all just "plain-Jane evidence." Not probabilistic evidence vs. non-probabilistic. Not inductive explanations vs. deductive. Not negative evidence or positive evidence.

Originally Posted by Solo

Before starting to google out erudition and harvest at length random "hits" you should reflect on the contexts in which my remarks occured.




And now you are wasting time talking in terms noone even remotely familiar with the methods of history would recognize or accept.

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

Actually JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, and ScienceDirect, but no matter. I was going to just refer to works that I had, but that wouldn't allow you to see them. So I had to find ones you could.






No one? From Avizier Tucker's Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge University Press, 2004): "But it is also necessary to clarify and develop Rescher's acknolwedgement that consensus can be a positive evidential factor and therefore has an instrumental value in discovering groups that share knowledge."

So if I had said "positive evidential factor" rather than "positive evidence" that would have been ok?

Originally Posted by Duvduv

Seems to me that if the author of Acts knew about Galatians he would never have placed the persecutions in Jerusalem.

Originally Posted by MrMacSon

Hi,
Paul may simply be a literary device; he may just be a fictional character used to portray a message.

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

We have a series of letters written by an author claiming to be named Paul. It's true that (for various reasons) authors would write works (like letters) using another's name (e.g., some or all of Plato's letters). What do these pseudepigraphical texts have in common? There is a great deal of literature on the subject, ranging from works which deal with the topic on a general level (e.g., the edited volume Der griechische Briefroman: Gattungstypologie und Textanalyse) to those which deal with specific letters (e.g., Foucart's "La VI^e lettre attribuée à Démosthène"). There are also nice collections of these letters (e.g., Costa's Greek Fictional Letters which includes the original greek and translations as well as commentary). Searching through this literature we find a few interesting things:

1) Pseudepigraphical letters were almost always attributed to well-known historical individuals like Socrates, Plato, Euripides, etc. In other words, nobody would bother to write under Paul's name unless he was a well-known figure (at least in early "christian" circles).
2) Those which are not are part of a literary tradition (e.g., the work of Aelian) which dates not just after Paul, but after our earliest actual papyri of Paul's letters (e.g., p46), and are not seperate creations but parts of novels.
3) Unlike with, say, the letters of Cicero, where our manuscripts date (as is typical) from the 9th or 10th centuries CE, we have extant textual attestation for Paul's letters a mere ~150 years after they were written. We also have an incredibly large number of copies to compare. Thus we are in an excellent position from a textual critical point of view, and this allows us to determine which letters are almost certainly those of Paul, which are questionable, and which are almost certainly not written by Paul.

Originally Posted by MrMacSon

Hi,
Paul may simply be a literary device; he may just be a fictional character used to portray a message.

Originally Posted by Toto

I think the character Saul / Paul in Acts is a fictional character used to portray a message. This character might have some slight connection to the author of the Pauline letters. But the author of Acts does not seem to have even tried to force his story to dovetail with the letters.

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

Notice the differences though:

1) Rivera is not saying "if that nutty guy responded in that way, then the other guy had that hoodie on" although this is the logical transformation of the conditional. In other words, although the "structure" appears equivalent to how you are transforming Paul's "conditional", if we transform this structure into the logical equivalent, we get something different than what Rivera means. He is asserting that were it not for the hoodie, the neighborhood watch guy wouldn't have responded to him in that violent way, or rather that the reason the neighborhood watch guy responded as he did was because of the hoodie. He is not asserting that on the assumption that the neighborhood watch guy did respond in that way, then we can conclude the other guy had that hoodie. Once again, the logical interpretation of a "conditional" fails to capture its use in actual speech.

2) An alternative way to say what Rivera meant would be "I'll bet money that the nutty neighborhood watch guy responded in that violent and aggressive way because of the hoodie." The structure of this sentence about as complex, but by phrasing it as a "counterfactual" Rivera emphasizes what would not have happened as well as why what did happen, happened. In your reading of Paul, what Paul wishes to say is "I didn't see any other apostles." Instead, what he says is "If I didn't see James, then I didn't see any other of the apostles." This is what I mean by "nobody does this in any language that I know of." Not that we don't find the "structure" of such a conditional, but that when we do it is a) almost never used in the "logical" sense, and b) nobody uses a complicated conditional when a simple proposition would be much clearer, simpler, shorter, etc.



"And they were offended by him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, if not in his home town, and in his household.”

And this is why I find the article you link to so bizarre. There's no shortage of literature on conditionals as they are used in speech, logics (classical, three-valued, fuzzy, etc), and human reasoning, not to mention Greek. Apart from Wakker's monograph on the subject I already mentioned:and numerous reference grammars, there are plenty of other sources. For example, both On Conditionals and On Condationals Again contain papers on the conditional in ancient Greek(Greenberg's "The realis-irrealis continuum in the Classical Greek conditional" in the former and Seiler's "Conditionality in dimensional perspective" in the latter). The first paper in In the footsteps of Raphael Kühner (Proceedings of the International Colloqium in Commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Raphael Kühner's Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, II. Theil: Syntaxe.) is on conditionals. And that's without getting into the literature on conditionals and idioms specific to NT greek.

Yet the paper you refer to relies on the use of logical transformations despite extensive literature over the past four decades on why this almost never works. People simply do not use conditionals the way logicians do. So when the authors state:

"The rationale for such transformation is seen in two basic inference rules. If you have a sentence of the form, “if A then B” there are two ways to make a valid deduction from the sentence: (1) If “A” is true then you know “B” is true (modus ponens “method of affirming” inference rule); (2) If “B” is false then you know “A” is false (modus tollens “method of denial” inference rule). The logical equivalent of a sentence “if A, then B” (modus ponens) is, therefore, “if not B, then not A” (modus tollens)."

they are making a serious error. People generally do make the first type of inference and use that type of logical structure (if A then B) in that way. However, as early as the experiments by Wason & Johnson-Laird (1972) to later experiments in evolutionary psychology (e.g., Sperber, Cara & Girotto (1995) ), studies have repeatedly demonstrated not simply that people don't use conditionals like this (such that transformations can be applied), but that they generally fail to make valid inferences one we leave the territory of

If A, B
A
Therefore B.

In other words, the second type of "inference rule" discussed by the author is one which people generally either have to concentrate on or just get wrong. Additionally, they frequently apply invalid inference rules. Thus, justifying logical transformations using "inference rules" people generally either get wrong (or at least have to think about), or don't use, or both, seems to me to be a very poor justification.

In Matt. 13:57, the sense is "A prophet is not atimos, except in his home town and household."

But you are going even beyond what the authors do. They apply the logical transformation and get "if I saw any of the other apostles, then I saw james." You transform that conditional into "If I didn't see James, then I didn't see any of the other apostles" and conclude that this is how Paul was trying to say "I didn't see any of the other apostles."

We might expect these types of conditionals from Lewis Carroll or intro to logic textbooks (or from logicians playing with language), but not in natural writing/speech.

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

There exists an extensive literature on fictional epistles in the classic and hellenistic world: