Whack a Mole, err. Horse

[_Who Knows]

Who Knows writes:

Although Dale and Dan have different theories, I'm pretty sure they agree that 'god didn't do it'.

Yes, and of course the corrolary is that while Brant and David and myself have different views, I am pretty sure that we all agree that 'god was involved'. So what kind of point is this?

Yeah, well, that's why I wrote:

I guess it depends on what the 'problems' mean for you. Do the problems associated with accepting a loose translation mean that the Book of Mormon could possibly have not come from 'god'? And vice-versa for Brant? Maybe, maybe not.

I take it that the problems you see with accepting Brant's theory still don't point towards a 'man-made' Book of Mormon? In other words, both yours and Brant's theories both point towards a 'god-given' Book of Mormon equally well?

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Not really. One of the problems I have in discussing my textual views of the Book of Mormon with other LDS is that I start at a fundamentally different point then Brant does. I don't think that Brant has ever stopped to consider the fundamental questions of what a text is in the way that I have. To try and explain this, Brant works with a lot of texts and their translations. And so for him, the kinds of issues that he sees people bring up in the text of the Book of Mormon he deals with in the same way that he deals with translational issues and hypothetical sources in the other texts he is used to working with.

For me, a lot of this is unnecessary. I view Joseph Smith as a reader of the text. And the situations aren't entirely different in some ways - and are in others. If Joseph is merely a reader of the text, that has a whole range of implications for the text as a whole. But we have to ask (and this is more of a metaphysical question) who is the intended audience. Following Goffman's classification of roles for a speech act, Joseph Smith is merely the animator, and in a tight process, God is the author (but not the principal). So, God chooses the words that get used. But, those words are chosen for an idealized audience (which may be a real audience I suppose). That is, if we see Joseph as indicative of the larger intended audience of the text, then Joseph Smith has already caused (by his condition) certain things within the text - at the very least, the ambiguous English language in which it was authored. These kinds of issues play a more prominent role in my view. Take the notion of the horse. It is (contra David) very easy to see the reformed Egyptian or Egyptian word for "horse" being used within the text without it referring to what we we call a real horse msot of the time (the exception might be when it quotes Isaiah). This kind of notion is analogous to Marco Polo consistently calling a rhinoceros a unicorn. He expands the definition of the word unicorn (not replacing it more traditional meaning) but adding to it. There is a good discussion on this in Eco's Kant and the Platypus. If Nephi encounters an unknown animal what does he use to name it in this language which is only written and not spoken which he is using to produce his text? Why would he do this? Its hard to say - why did Polo decide he had encountered a unicorn instead of something different? What if Nephi noticed (to use one example) that the tapir was an odd-toed ungulate just like the horse (one of only a handful of such species in existence). Foot structure plays a role in determining clean and unclean animals - and the list of animals provided in 1 Nephi tends to look an awful lot like a list of clean animals from Deuteronomy (we would expect that on encoutering new species, this would have been a significant issue for those Mosaic Law abiding Nephites). So rather than come up with entirely new names for them, in the language in which Nephi was writing ont he Gold Plates, he simply absorbs these creatures under familiar names and the issue of classifying them is solved. Of course, if there are no more traditional horses then within a generation, the old world notion has completely vanished from the implied meaning of the word horse, and we are left with words in this "reformed Egyptian" language which are based on words from the Brass Plates, but which will, of course, have evolved meanings within this culture (much like we observe elsewhere). And so this brings us back to the translational difficulty. Despite the fact that we know that Marco Polo was refering to a rhinoceros as opposed to a real unicorn, that distinction exists only for us - because we don't recognize the expanded meaning to the word as used by Polo. So while for Nephi the word horse might have meant horse + something else, we don't know what that something else was. However, to go through Marco Polo's text and translate the word "unicorn" as "rhinoceros instead does significant damage to the text and makes parts of it incoherent. Since we preface this with the idea that God is the translator, and recognizing that English is ambiguous as a language independant of how perfect the translator is, what kind of translator do we make God out to be as he attempts to author a translation that conveys the intentions of the principal? Is he a literal word-for-word kind of translator? An idea-for-idea translator? All I have ever really gotten from Beastie is that this is a meaningless question, since she feels that God is the principal, and that the purpose of the Book of Mormon would have been better served if it was written in such a way as to be convincing to her that it was an authentic history. But I don't buy this argument either. The whole point of this extended parenthetical is that there is as much needed discussion on these philsophical issues as there is about the text. And that the assumptions we make about God as translator have so far dominated the debate without getting any discussion. And this is also meant to show why discussion or debate between Brant and I isn't going to be quite as useful as people might think. Given Brant's assumptions, his model may work very well to describe the data. My description of the data may also work very well, but it is based on entirely different assumptions - and for us to talk about the differences in our approach, you might see that we would not really be talking about the text at all - and that both of us - taking different routes to this position - will claim that Joseph exerts influence over the final product - either as the author (as opposed to God) or as the idealized audience who is going to read the text.