Dan:
I wouldn't normally point this out, but since we're dealing only with written communication here, with no visual or tonal cues, I will say that I'm not upset as I post this. Some of what I say may come across that way, however.
When you and Roger make blatant logical errors while at the same time accusing your opponents of being illogical and stupid, I decided not to hold back.
I have no problem with you deciding "not to hold back." I wouldn't expect you to. However, when you state that marg and I "make blatant logical errors while at the same time accusing [our] opponents of being illogical and stupid" I have to respectfully, but forcefully disagree. I'm not going to CFR for quotes but I will say that I am confident you can pull whatever quote you want of mine and you won't find one where I accuse you of "being illogical and stupid."
To be clear, I may have argued that you are employing an illogical or inconsistent argument at some point, but I never once accused you of being stupid, nor would I because I don't believe you are.
I would have mentioned logic anyway, but not so strongly. You and Roger talk about what you think is logical or reasonable, only without any real knowledge of it.
How could you possibly know the extent of "real knowledge" either marg or I have? Are you God? Are you a mind reader? If not, then why phrase things so forcefully? It's ironic that you claim we use personal insults, such as allegedly calling you stupid, when you won't find one example of it, and yet in the same post, here you are, claiming to know the extent of our "real knowledge."
What started my comments about Roger is the following statement:
And I told you from the beginning that I am not concerned about following pre-determined rules for the formal structure of arguments or formally identifying logical fallacies.
Yes. That is the statement I made. I stand by it then and now. You overreacted then and you seem to be overreacting still. This is how you recently mischaracterized it:
It wasn’t my imagination that you responded to the first mention of logic—argument from silence, to be precise—by saying you didn’t care about formal ways of arguing and that you were going to violate logic anyway.
Once again, you won't find that in anything I wrote. It is, in fact, a mischaracterization on your part. And I don't understand why you feel the need to so mischaracterize. The statement is very candid, easy to understand and straightforward:
I am not concerned about following pre-determined rules for the formal structure of arguments or formally identifying logical fallacies.
Not once does this quote say that I am going to "violate logic anyway." You're an author. You should know that words carry meaning and I generally try to choose my words carefully.
What it says is that I am not
concerned about playing the type of game you want to play where you get to anoint yourself logic police, prosecutor, judge and jury. Instead I told you what I am interested in. Did you read that part?
For example:
Roger wrote:Whatever maneuvers I may or may not be guilty of are operating at a subconscious level. In other words it is not my intention to maneuver you or manipulate your answer or trap you or anything of the kind. My intention is not to "win" an argument, here, it is to understand your position and after doing so to challenge you in areas where I think your conclusions are wrong. I respect your opinion and I think we actually agree on several things. In fact, quite honestly, I really don't think there is much difference between your position and mine when it comes right down to it.
And then there was this:
Roger wrote:I am less concerned than you are, apparently, with identifying whatever argument style either of us are using as opposed to simply understanding your reasons for rejecting the claims of the S/R witnesses while accepting those of the Book of Mormon witnesses.
And this:
Roger wrote:I have little desire to get bogged down in discussion over the nuances of logical fallacies, but it seems to be important to you.
All of that is very candid, straightforward and easy to understand.
My pointing out logical errors is gamesmanship and one-upmanship?
Yes. From our vantage point, that is what it looks like.
Strange attitude for someone engaged in debate.
Which is why I pointed out many pages ago, that it I am not in this for the sake of debate, and I can't speak for marg, but I am guessing it's likely the same with her. We are interested in
who really produced the content for the Book of Mormon.
That's what we're interested in. Not in winning some juvenile debate. I have much better ways of spending my time than attempting to beat you at a meaningless internet debate. In fact IF I WERE in it merely to win a debate, my approach would be entirely different. I have been very candid and open with you but that would not be the case if I were simply attempting to win a debate.
None of that is to say that I object to forceful & meaningful challenges to S/R. If S/R is not the best explanation for the Book of Mormon I am interested in knowing that. But I'm not interested in debate merely for the sake of debate.
I’m not allowed to correct your logic?
You're not allowed to proclaim yourself the logic police, prosecutor, judge and jury. For example, you arrest and charge me with the fallacy of argument from silence and yet, it sure seems to me that your argument suffers from the same problem, and, I would suggest (as I already did many pages ago) even more fatally. But if Dan is the arresting officer, prosecutor, judge and jury, then I have no appeal. You pronounce a guilty verdict and sentence me to silence on the issue as though your judgment settles the matter.
I don’t know about you, but I believe logic is an important aspect of finding the truth. It’s not a game. Those who engage in polemics and wildly speculate are the ones playing games.
Fair enough.
Roger's writes: "While I agree that Joseph Smith is the most likely contributer for certain portions of the Book of Mormon text, he is not the most likely contributer for all of it. But Dan's assumption only allows for gaining insight into what Joseph Smith "thinks and feels about himself and the world" because his assumption is that only Joseph Smith contributed content to the text."
You write: "That’s only true if we assume you are right. If I’m right that Joseph Smith was sole author, then I’m on the right track. My method isn’t a way a determining authorship, except in rare instances. The only reason I can analyze the Book of Mormon the way I do is because Joseph Smith believed what he was writing, not just making stories up like a novelist. With Spalding’s authorship, you will run into the intentional fallacy, because a novel doesn’t necessarily tell you about what the author believes."
You are not making sense here, and you a putting things together that don’t belong.
Marg is, in fact, making sense. The fallacy is right there in your premise. You write:
The only reason I can analyze the Book of Mormon the way I do is because Joseph Smith believed what he was writing, not just making stories up like a novelist.
Stating that the only reason you can analyze the Book of Mormon the way you do is because "Joseph Smith believed what he was writing, not just making stories up like a novelist" is nothing more than a polemical assertion stated as though it were fact. It is not even close to being an established fact. You could easily solve that dilemma by treating it as the polemical statement it is and adding the words "I believe" to your assertion. But you don't.
So marg appropriately notes that:
marg wrote:So you justify your interpretation of the Book of Mormon via Smith as author as being valid because according to you, you aren't violating the "intentional fallacy". I don't think intentional fallacy has anything to do with this. My best guess is the intentional fallacy is applied to one who evaluates literature using as the assumption that it will reflect an author's personal life..when they shouldn't because the literature may be a novel and completely unrelated to the author's life. But you don't think the Book of Mormon is a novel you think the writer Smith thought it was true or it was a true reflection of himself.
According to our trusty friend Wiki, marg seems to be correct:
Intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy", a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important. The term is an important principle of New Criticism and was first used by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946 rev. 1954): "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." The phrase "intentional fallacy" is somewhat ambiguous, but it means "a fallacy about intent" and not "a fallacy committed on purpose."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_fallacy
...so, given that here's what marg writes:
Let's look at the logic involved. You have no basis for your assumption Smith believed what he wrote. Smith did not claim he wrote the Book of Mormon, in fact he said it was written by ancient prophets. In addition there is no reason to assume the writer/writers actually believed the contents of the Book of Mormon were true. All they were interested in was a scriptural book to be used as the basis to a new religion, the contents did not need to be true, and obviously Smith knew they weren't.
So Roger was correct. And your use of throwing out "intentional fallacy" was a rhetorical game of one upmanship on your part. Intentional fallacy is irrelevant to this situation. With most novels it is assumed the author is the author. In this case, the claimed writer/translator J. smith does not claim to be the author, so it's not an automatic presumption that he is... especially given the manner in which it was claimed to have been written.
The only area I might slightly disagree with marg is her assertion that the author's intent--if that's what we mean when we say "intentional fallacy"--is irrelevant to this situation. I don't think it's necessarily irrelevant, but I do think she is correct to point out that
the very authorship is what is in question here! How then is it possible to speak to intent, if we don't even know who the author is?
You are free
to theorize as much as we are about what any hypothesized author's intent may be, and attempt to mine the text for clues to support your thesis.... but that's not the way you're presenting your case when you state it as fact and rest it all on the unsupported assumption that "Joseph Smith believed what he was writing."
I think that's an intriguing question, but again, it's not even close to being an established fact. My thesis is that Smith MAY have actually believed the manuscript he obtained from Rigdon contained an actual history of the ancient inhabitants of North America, but, even if he did, I
highly doubt he actually believed those ancients prophesied about his coming.
You wrote:
Roger and I went talking about authorship at this point. We were talking about reading the text to find out what an author believed. I was warning him of potential problems with trying to read the Book of Mormon with the assumption that Spalding wrote it. You haven’t said anything to change that. It’s not one-upmanship, it’s a legitimate point.
This is another slightly annoying thing you keep doing. Notice your exact words:
I was warning him of potential problems with trying to read the Book of Mormon with the assumption that Spalding wrote it.
I don't know how many times I've pointed out that statements like these are a gross over-generalization. Do I need to come up with a fancy logical fallacy name for it? Shall we call it the "Intentional Over-generalization Fallacy"? Let's review:
1. S/R does not (nor to my knowledge ever has) claimed that Spalding wrote the Book of Mormon.
2. No Spalding advocate that I know has ever claimed that Spalding wrote the Book of Mormon
3. Critics of S/R
DO erroneously claim that S/R claims that Spalding wrote the Book of Mormon.
4. Those critics are building straw men
So, with that firmly in mind, let us now consider this:
I was warning him of potential problems with trying to read the Book of Mormon with the assumption that Spalding wrote it. You haven’t said anything to change that.
Of course she hasn't said anything to change that. Since no one claims Spalding wrote the Book of Mormon, I agree that there might be potential problems if one attempts to read it with that assumption.
What I propose is that a Spalding manuscript was embellished, edited, abridged and, in general, made use of by Sidney Rigdon. And then the resulting (new) manuscript was handed over to Smith and Cowdery who made even more additions and changes. 116 pages were subsequently lost, forcing an entirely rewritten and apparently different beginning. Any of these content contributors could have plagiarized and/or borrowed general concepts and phrases from outside sources
at any point in the process, and it's likely that most of them did so.
What we are left with then--according to my thesis--should be a mish-mash of content from various sources, some of which might contain some verbatim quotes from Spalding, but the majority of which would be surrounded by content that was added long after Spalding died. Therefore, to assert that S/R claims "Spalding wrote the Book of Mormon" either illustrates a gross misunderstanding of what S/R actually suggests, or a mischaracterization of it--either intentional or otherwise.
As Glenn points out, some of the Conneaut witnesses use the word "verbatim" to describe the relationship between the Book of Mormon and Spalding's now lost manuscript. But I take that word with a grain of salt. There may indeed have been phrases, possibly even sentences that were direct copies, but I strongly suspect such instances are rare, with the bulk of the "verbatim" copies being surrounded and intermixed with new content--sort of like what I did with my little "how I became a Spalding advocate" tale, only better (ie. more disguised). If Dale's speculation is correct, when the witnesses got to the book of Alma, for example, they would certainly begin to see text that jogged their memories, reminded them of Spalding's text and seemed, just like they state, to have been "the same" with the addition of religious material. And they would also have noticed that Lehi and Nephi were prominent heroes in the early part of the Book of Mormon, as was the case, so they claim, in Spalding's tale. But it is entirely probable--in fact likely due to the re-written beginning--that Lehi and Nephi, although heroes in both tales, were not doing the same things in both tales.
So... instead of reading the entire Book of Mormon with the assumption that Spalding wrote it--which is far too simplistic--I would instead listen to experts like Dale and Holley and compare with Jocker's to see if we can pinpoint the most Spaldingish sections in the text and then see if the content of those sections lines up with the kind of material we would expect from Spalding and the others.
In fact, that seems to be the case. Of course, this is not true in every case, but, the idea would be to pinpoint a few of the most likely sections for each of these possible authors and then see if that content matches what we would expect from each of these authors.
Despite the hoopla, Schaalje's contribution doesn't change that.
But in answer to Glenn, I doubt that there was much direct, verbatim copying. S/R critics are quick to disbelieve our Conneaut friends on other details, never failing to point out the twenty year gap as the logic for dismissing whatever they want to dismiss, but are then eager to take "verbatim" as literally as possible.
"...a pious lie, you know, has a great deal more influence with an ignorant people than a profane one."
- Sidney Rigdon, as quoted in the Quincy Whig, June 8, 1839, vol 2 #6.