Marg,
I’m responding to your 15 May discussion of ad hoc hypotheses.
It's a matter of general critical thinking applied. I gave one such reference explaining how to critically evaluate witnesses ..by Alec Fisher.
As I showed, you went beyond what Fisher described and misapplied the principles discussed in that book. The categories listed were used to give a veneer of critical assessment. When the advice was to be skeptical in extraordinary circumstances—like claims of miracles and the supernatural—skepticism is warranted, which you incorrectly applied to the ordinary observations of Joseph Smith with head in hat. Yet, you still found it necessary to contradictorily postulate a trick-hat theory. You need to review my response to your very amateur assessment of the Mormon witnesses.
Well Joseph Smith wanted evidence..that's why he uses the testimonies in the beginning of the Book of Mormon. Had he used individuals with no vested interest, and even better if they had community respect and others testified to their lack of involvement..that would have made a difference. The circumstances are such that the individuals Joseph Smith chose..were not independent objective witnesses..other than a hostile witness or two. But of any hostile witness the circumstances described would have to be such that they were not in the position in which J. Smith controlled the situation.
You are arguing two things simultaneously—are they interested witnesses to the point of lying, or is Joseph Smith in control enough to fool them with your postulated trick-hat? Which is it? You have yet to answer this question. Joseph Smith may have chose the three and eight witnesses, but he didn’t choose the Hales and Whitmers, whom he lived with. On the other hand, Hurlbut chose his witnesses and had some control over what was recorded, whereas Joseph Smith was long dead when most of the witnesses gave their statements--independent from one another and without any prospect of reward. You are also subtly begging the question by assuming what you are trying to prove. You assume Joseph Smith had control over non-Mormon witnesses, and that he quickly whipped the hat and stone out when he saw Mr. Hale coming through the window. That’s totally ad hoc. Rather, these are incidental witnesses. You are attempting to have it both ways—Mormon witnesses are interested and can’t be trusted, and non-Mormon witnesses were fooled. You have ruled out all potential witnesses. That’s how ad hocs protect main theories in ways that don’t allow for falsification.
That's not to say Dan..that just because they had a vested interest and just because Joseph Smith chose them, that that would automatically disqualify all and every claim they make. One has to evaluate the sorts of claims being made..and as you should be aware..the more extraordinary the claim the more extraordinary the evidence one should expect in order to rationally accept a claim. The evidence should commensurate with the claim. And that evidence, the Book of Mormon witnesses's claims should be considered within the context of all the other data. It helps if there is any objective independent data which would support their extraordinary claims..but in this case there isn't any.
This is an example of how you didn’t understand the criteria you were attempting to use. This principle applies to the visionary experience of the three witnesses (and possibly the eight witnesses), but it doesn’t apply to the ordinary circumstances experienced through the five senses. Certainly Joseph Smith’s dictating with head in hat was uncommon, but it became an every-day experience for those who lived with him.
I do think Smith used a "head in the hat' schtick..sometimes. But those times in which he did were temporary and for show and for people who he didn't want in on the know of what exactly was happening and in some cases i.e. Emma, I think some of those people didn't want to know all the details either. That's my opinion.
It doesn’t matter what you think, but what the witnesses reported. You can’t just make stuff up and expect that it has any evidentiary value. What you just said has no meaning—it doesn’t exist. You are welcome to your opinion—but that’s all it is. It has no value in discussions like this—it’s all about arguments that have some kind of logical force. Instead, in the face of counter-evidence you resort to fantasy that goes way beyond any evidence. Emma, Harris, Cowdery, one of the Whitmers, sat as scribes, hour after hour, writing what Joseph Smith dictated. To get around this evidence, you invent ad hocs about conspirators and self-deception. This speculation is largely unfalsifiable because it’s not based on evidence in the first place—it’s born of desperation and a need to be right.
Dan the ad hoc fallacy is applicable in situations in which the claim is open to verifiability and therefore can be falsified. One can not refute a claim which is not falsifiable. What happens in a situation in which the ad hoc fallacy is applicable, a claim is made and a counter claim refutes with evidence, or falsified it..and the claimant responds by changing the assumptions in a particular way that makes the original claim unfalsifiable.
So ad hoc fallacy works in situations such as in science, in which scientific claims are open to verifiability through observation and testing. Scientific claims which can not be tested, can generally be verified because they have predictive power which eventually is open to verification. The ad hoc fallacy will also work with any claim which is potentially falsifiable with evidence. Unless the claim has been refuted or falsified ...the ad hoc fallacy would not be applicable to the argument or theory.
So the ad hoc fallacy works like this:
Step 1 - Person A makes a claim
Step 2 - Person B refutes it with evidence
Step 3 - Person A counters with an explanation that changes the originial assumptions and makes the claim impossible to falsify.
Step 4 - Person B is now justifed in responding that Person A has committed an ad hoc fallacy ..hence the discussion on that claim would be irrational to continue..as it could go on indefinitely..with reasoning being irrelevant to resolving the issue.
I think you basically get the process, but are trying to invent a loophole—hence, I would add that the original claim was falsifiable, but becames unfalsifiable when ad hocs were employed to save it, which are usually unfalsifiable themselves. The original claim may still be vulnerable to adverse evidence, which can always be remedied with further ad hocs and adjustments. And ad hocs don’t have to be adjustments to background assumptions. Let’s try your steps with the issue under discussion:
Step 1 – S/R theory postulates MS was used in production of the Book of Mormon, which is open to falsification.
Step 2 – Mormon witnesses, both friendly and unfriendly, testify that no MS was used and that the translation was performed with Joseph Smith’s head in hat.
Step 3- The witnesses either lied, or were part of the conspiracy, or didn’t want to know the truth, or were fooled by Joseph Smith’s occasional demonstrations, or all the time with a trick hat. These can be seen as unfalsifiable ad hoc responses to counter-evidence, or as adjustments in background theory that once assumed a rewrite of Spalding’s MS without witnesses.
Step 4- I’m therefore justified in accusing a certain Spalding advocate of inventing ad hocs to escape adverse evidence.
As I explained before, the invention of ad hocs do not automatically disprove a theory—but it weighs the main theory down and eventually it will fall out of favor.
So my suggestion on how Smith might have performed his head in hat schtick..was not the original claim. I'm responding to the original claim (A) that Smith composed the entire Book of Mormon with his head in a hat..for all scribes. I'm suggesting a possibility (B) which might have occurred with some scribes.
As I showed above, you are misconstruing what is going on in this situation. You are responding to adverse evidence in an ad hoc way.
But that claim (A) as to what Smith did and the part the Book of Mormon witnesses played in the scheme is not open to evidential falsifiability. At least not that particular event with those particular participants. It's impossible to refute that claim (A), unless objective evidence can be obtained in order to do so..such as WP study which objectively shows more than one person composed the Book of Mormon and even further who some of those people were. So ad hoc fallacy is not applicable because right off to bat, the original claim of Smith with head'n hat supported by Book of Mormon witnesses is not open to falsifiability. So there is no ad hoc fallacy going on here Dan. All one can do, is critically evaluate the claim and offer reasoning why it should or should not be accepted and under what circumstances if it is rejected that it could eventually be accepted.
You are attempting to invent a loophole and to quibble your way out of the mess you caused for yourself by not walking lightly in unfamiliar territory. The original claim made by Spalding advocates—that Joseph Smith used a MS in producing the Book of Mormon—is falsifiable; hence, my appeal to eyewitness testimony in regard to Joseph Smith’s method of translation. You say it’s impossible to refute claim “(A) that Smith composed the entire Book of Mormon with his head in a hat..for all scribes.” That’s not exactly right, but it does show that it is a strong counter to the Spalding claim. In fact, the Spalding theory was born in ignorance of this kind of evidence. It was potentially refutable with Mr. Hale and Michael Morse, but you ad hocked them away. One of the disaffected believers could have confessed and verified your version of things. The original Book of Mormon MS could show signs of visual copying, or Joseph Smith could have reproduced the MS when it was lost—implying that he had a MS. If the Mormon witnesses’ claims aren’t open to verifiability, the Spalding witnesses’ reliance on 20-year old memories aren’t either—and you’ve lost the only thing holding up the Spalding theory. But that’s nonsense. If this standard were actually adopted in historiography, there would be no history to write about. Such a situation would be ideal, but certainly not required. Mormon witnesses should be treated as any witnesses. To suggest that witnesses need some kind of objective evidence like word print studies to be trusted is ludicrous. However, you touch on another possible falsification, that is, if word print studies on the Book of Mormon were objectively reliable. At any rate, your effort to create a sub-category of ad hoc that somehow isn’t an ad hoc fallacy doesn’t work. Ad hoc is ad hoc, but as my quote from
How to Think About Weird Things (which I didn’t intentionally misquote by accidentally skipping a line) shows—there are legitimate and illegitimate ad hocs in science.
[A] popular method for shielding hypotheses from adverse evidence: constructing ad hoc hypotheses. A hypothesis threatened by recalcitrant data can often be saved by postulating entities or properties that account for the data. Such a move is legitimate if there’s an independent means of verifying their existence. If there is no such means, the hypothesis is ad hoc.
Ad hoc literally means “for this case only.” But it’s not simply that a hypothesis is designed to account for a particular phenomenon that makes it ad hoc (if that were the cace, all hypotheses would be ad hoc). What makes a hypothesis ad hoc is that if can’t be verified independently of the phenomenon it’s supposed to explain. …
(Theodore Schick, Jr., and Lewis Vaughn, How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age [Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Pub. Co., 1999], 156-58).
The conclusion here is that you don’t know what an ad hoc fallacy is—which might explain why you commit so many of them. So let me continue my explanation of ad hocs by discussing how they figure in discussions of history and in deciding between theories/interpretations/explanations, etc. I’ll be quoting from various places with little explanation:
A just-so story, also called the ad hoc fallacy, is a term used in academic anthropology, biological sciences, social sciences, and philosophy. It describes an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The use of the term is an implicit criticism that reminds the hearer of the essentially fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
These [two standards] are that the hypothesis should be simpler than any competing hypothesis, and that it should be of a greater degree of falsifiability than any other. There are several ways in which the requirement of simplicity can be interpreted …, and for ensuring the truth of singular historical descriptions the sort of simplicity required is the minimum of ad hocness. The less a historical hypothesis goes beyond what is already known, the more likely it is to be true. … but they [historians] do not prefer hypotheses which present a long ad hoc story accounting for a few observations, such that although the story could conceivably be confirmed or disconfirmed by a large number of observation statements, in fact the number of actual observations it implies is very small.--Christopher Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge, 1984), 20.
The second way of avoiding ad hoc-ness is comparing one’s interpretive hypothesis with those of others. In historical interpretation, as in science, comparing different hypotheses with an eye on the data to be accounted for is one of the best methods of testing and it should always be applied. --Heidegger's philosophy of being: a critical interpretation By Herman Philipse
It should become clear that the kinds of maneuvers you have been attempting here in this thread are sure signs of a theory in trouble.