Pike's ghost

James Wynn · 30 Nov 2011, 17:44 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 11:44:37 -0600
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
In-Reply-To: <4ED66607.5060508 at gmail.com>
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>
>>
>>>
>>>>> entonio at gmail.com wrote:
>>>>> It doesn't. 'X is wrong' is not the same as 'All but Y are wrong'.
>>>>
>>>> James Wynn wrote:
>>>> Perhaps, but if your method of proof is to assert that there is an
>>>> alternate interpretation, then you aren't proving anything except that
>>>> there is an alternate interpretation.
>>>
>>> Ant?nio Marques wrote:
>>> It can become entangled, no? When you point out actual problems with an
>>> interpretation and *then* people ask you for an alternative,
>>
>> Unfortunately that is not the only way it happens. What very often 
>> happens
>> is that someone suggests an explanation of an occurrence that is not
>> explicitly declared or based on irony or allusion, and someone else will
>> respond with:
>>
>>     "This explanation is a totally unsupported. The truth of this 
>> event is
>>     clearly declared in text [James notes: although actually only 
>> implied]
>>     by this flat half-blind reading of the story that I follow. Thus, 
>> I have
>>     proved that my initial reading is correct and not in need of
>>     enlightenment because I am eschewing any high literary 
>> understanding of
>>     the events and other literary voodoo."
>>
>> This person is not refuting an explanation AND THEN going on to 
>> explain his
>> alternate understanding. He refuting an explanation WITH his alternate
>> understanding.
>
> Ant?nio Pedro Marques wrote:
> Even in your parody above, your person starts off with 'This 
> explanation is a totally unsupported'. That's the refuting part, not 
> the eventual Dumb Interpretation. What I suggest is that next time you 
> see someone declaring an interpretation as totally unsupported without 
> an explanation, you call them on that. 

I believe that "calling them on that" is already documented in several 
dozen threads on this list. It doesn't work, because as I stated, the 
person believes his interpretation is the default interpretation, argues 
that is relentlessly, and believes, therefore, that the *existence* of 
his alternate interpretation is explanation enough that the other is 
unsupported.

Actually, it is very rare here that someone offers any theory that is 
certifiably "unsupported". Trying to prove it is is probably a waste of 
time.

> Arguing abstractions may be useful for making general cases - I did it 
> above and you do it here -, but general cases only need making if 
> they're not obvious. I presented the one above because it seemed to me 
> it wasn't obvious. However, I have difficulty seeing how yours isn't - 
> nobody has to be told what's wrong with a dismissal that doesn't 
> present a reason (or whose reason wasn't general knowledge unadressed 
> by the hypothesis).

I don't think you are recognizing the problem. The problem is that we 
have two people who are using quite different methods of interpretation 
and one of them is claiming that the other's is not valid or, at least, 
never valid unless the reading is first credentialed by his own 
interpretive methods.

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