uncritical acceptance

Jerry Friedman · 08 Apr 2002, 20:19 · from urth-v0204.mbox · original

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: Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) uncritical acceptance
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2002 13:19:09 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0204-560 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0204/560.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

--- maa32 <maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu> wrote:
> Mark,
> As far as the distance, we want to believe it is pretty close because
> the=20
> einhumu have to travel between the two whorls.  It's odd - so many of
> the=20
> claims I've made have been argued against by a literal interpretation of
> the=20
> text - now the distances themselves are called into question.
>=20
> What purpose does the distorted distance of Green serve the text?

I think this is a very good question.

...

> Should we really question everything that comes=20
> from the second hand account?  What about The Book of the Long Sun?  All
> of=20
> that could be totally bogus.  But we have to believe something.  I think
>=20
> reliability should only be questioned to match an overwhelming theme or=20
> message.
>=20
> Honestly, I think I've accepted the least of what the text actually says
> of=20
> almost anyone. (How many times have I heard: "the text ACTUALLY says
> ..." to=20
> argue against me? I can't believe I've been called a textual literalist!
>  Me!=20
> Oh well.

First of all, the distance to Green is probably the *most* overtly
unreliable information in the trilogy.  Silkhorn says that Inclito
says that Gagliardo says that it's 30,000 leagues, and I find it
very hard to see how Gagliardo could know.  On the other hand,
Wolfe could easily make the most unreliable-seeming statement
actually be true.

Second of all, it's kind of begging the question to believe things
that fit a theory and doubt things that conflict.

Jerry Friedman

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax
http://taxes.yahoo.com/

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net