Why Fallacies are False -- 12, strawman fallacy

I shoved a lot of stuff into that last post. If you came back, you gave me a chance to straighten things out.

Every place in the world has subsets of culture. Every subset has a different culture – not just material goods, like the difference between an evening gown worn by a Russian countess and the vyshivka worn by a peasant woman, but also their language, which reflects their mental concepts.

This creates communication problems. The best communicators know this from learning or experience, and adapt their communications to their audience. For decades, writing teachers have specifically said, “know your audience,” so that you write in a way they will understand. The writing style you would use in a historical novel will never work in a manga. The audiences have different expectations, even if some of them read both types of work.

When people sit on their high places and hand down information with content and expression of their choice, the people on the receiving end may reject it. It’s not a matter of the speaker using insulting words or voice tones. It’s a matter of communicating in the way the audience understands. Or not. Free speech has limits: even if your speech is protected, speaking doesn't mean your audience automatically has to agree with you.

Languages are expressions of a culture and are specific to that culture.

Every language has words for culture-specific phenomena. A translator who uses word for word substitution, first will not put across the complete nuance of single words and, second, will make nonsense out of idioms.

Every language has its own grammar. It may be ergative, aspectual, or based on tense. It’s not just morphology; it’s also sentence structure and punctuation. A translator who fails to incorporate the nuance of grammar cheats the reader into a false impression of the source document.

The meaning of words depends on their context. Dictionaries reflect this by having sub-entries. A translator who uses the meaning from the wrong sub-entry produces a strawman argument about the source document.

The context of a language is the culture using it. A translator who doesn’t explain cultural nuances deprives the reader of cultural riches.

The words and grammar issues are the original rules of SWLT. The contextual issue is implied but not stated in both of them. You’ll find the mantra CONTEXT IS KING all over my blog. A fourth issue is involved, but for that I have to discuss a whole other area of knowledge and I’m saving it for later.

Most people who teach Hebrew nowadays, in relationship to the Bible, are teaching a strawman argument about its grammar. They teach according to Mishnaic Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew is an ancient Semitic language resembling its oldest known relative, Akkadian, and its cousins. It uses aspect, which Modern Standard Arabic also does – and if you take a course in Arabic and your teacher doesn’t teach aspect, get your money back. Mishnaic Hebrew uses tenses. BH and MH differ in other ways as well, but the important thing is that the verb system of Biblical Hebrew is more complex and carries more layers of nuance than Mishnaic Hebrew.

Most teachers of Classical Greek are in the same situation. The oldest grammatical descriptions present a strawman argument by describing verbs in terms of tense, when it should be aspect. (Actually, it’s worse: up to one-third of grammarians’ claims either have no attestation in the surviving literature, or are contradicted by it.)

If you don’t know the language of the source document, as part of its cultural setting and in the context of what it says about that culture, anything you say about the source document is a strawman argument. If you insist on talking about a translation, you’ll have your best success if you do it inside your echo chamber. But as soon as you say the same things to people outside your echo chamber, you’ll deserve any pushback you get from people who can debunk what you say.

Which is true for every subject under the sun.

I'm just saying....dumbing down

I just read a skeet blaming the internet for dumbing us down.

Oh, no, my friend, we did this to ourselves. Project Gutenberg got its start in 1971 and went up on the Internet almost as soon as the public could get subscriptions. It now has over 72,000 documents.

Internet Archive started in 1996. It has billions of web captures and access to the Wayback Machine.

Universities post lectures on line. That's how I got to view Dr. Leonard Susskind's physics lectures based on his book series, The Theoretical Minimum. It's also how I got access to an antique Tanakh in Ladino, written in the Rashi script, and to the 1342 Munich Talmud manuscript which proves that all copies of Talmud now in print have restored what the pope censored in the 1500s.

LiveLingua and other sites provide language learning materials and access to individualized teaching. Websites worldwide, including Liber Liber in Italy; Audiolitterature in France; and a hundred other sites provide access to classics in various languages in audio. Other sites have the texts.

You can access international media to help your language learning: BBC, RFI, Deutsche Welle, RNE, NHK, Kan, and other media post audio, video, and articles online. You can also learn that the US viewpoint is not the only one out there. 

Wordproject and Sefaria are just two of many sites providing access to religious literature in more than one language. Several websites are dedicated to the Quran. Internet Archive has Max Muller's classic Sacred Books of the East. There are sites dedicated to Hindu, Buddhist, and other literature, in various languages.

Openstax and other Creative Commons websites host college level textbooks in business, math and science. There are websites that teach basic or advanced math. 

You can take art studies on the net; most of the well-known art in the world is available, including audio and video. 

If you are dumbed down but you have access to the Internet, you are dumbed down because you choose to be. 

Why Fallacies are False -- 11, translation

So now you understand why MAGA and non-MAGA can’t communicate in general; they are different cultural subsets. They speak differently and they think differently. Coming to agreement only works one on one, with pushback on every false fact and every fallacy involved in a MAGA conspiracy theory. It’s time-consuming and exhausting. And once your MAGA goes back into their subculture, they forget everything you told them. It’s not how their culture thinks.

But, back to my language geekiness. The science behind this goes back to the 1950s. It’s called Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Theory, and some people may try to convince you it’s outdated.

It can’t be outdated. Its two canonical rules address the things that ruin translations, which I discussed last week. I read a paper that complained that SWLT makes translation impossible. That’s a case of the ambiguity fallacy and how you define “translation”: if you expect a translation to be a word-for-word substitution, yes it does, but I showed last week that word substitution will always produce a bad translation anyway.

The complaint also ignores history. The Septuagint was known to be a bad translation within a hundred years of its publication, based on what Greek words and grammar it used, and that was nearly two thousand years before SWLT came out.

The corollary is that every translation that relies on the Septuagint, is a bad translation.

How do you know if a translation of the Bible relies on the Septuagint?

Look at Isaiah 7:14. If it uses the word “virgin”, that comes from the Septuagint.

It does not come from the Biblical Hebrew. It is a misrepresentation of the source document, and that fails the Test of Occam’s Razor, data portion. This is a case of SWLT Rule 1.

Another indicator is if it uses “and” all the time. The Septuagint uses kai almost every place the Biblical Hebrew has the vav prefix, and English translations that rely on the Septuagint turn kai into “and”.

In 21^st century Biblical Hebrew, that vav means something other than “and” ohhhh I think 90% of the time. With nouns, it means “but” some of the time. With verbs, it’s what Dr. John Cook labeled a “narrative past”, or it marks a verb as part of an oblique structure. I found out that it may be the “then” clause in an “if-then” involving a promise to do something. (Dr. Cook disagrees strictly on the basis of morphology but I talk about that on the blog.) Grammar is the subject of SWLT Rule 2.

Since translations are strawman arguments, misrepresenting what the source says, any claims or conclusions based on translations fail the Test of Occam’s Razor for the data portion of the test.

This includes DH. The earliest writer accepted into the canon is Jean Astruc. He admits that he used the Neuchatel French translation done by and for French Calvinists. DH is founded upon a strawman argument, a fallacy that makes its probability of truth zero percent. I have four or five posts about Astruc on my blog.

The strawman argument of a translation also affects claims that Talmud refers to Jesus. The first such claim came out in the 1700s CE; it is available on Internet Archive in both German and English. The author did not know Aramaic, making it impossible for him to know what the Talmud says. He had to rely on translations and….

Anybody who cites to him, or repeats his arguments, also fails. There is a standard set of citations that show up in the articles I’ve seen arguing the “Jesus in Talmud” claim. I know where all of them are – except for the ones that don’t actually exist. If you cite to something that doesn’t actually exist, you have a zero probability of truth.

This is a case of a true argument from silence; the claims are based solely on the surviving texts of both Talmuds, which thus represent complete datasets. The “censorship” thing is a red herring fallacy; for Babylonian Talmud, the surviving text has all the citations in the 1342 Munich manuscript (available free online), which pre-dates the 1555 cum nimis absurdum bull that led to (temporary) censorship.

I have studied the existing citations in the source documents. I have four or five blog posts about this. I told readers to submit new supposed citations and haven’t gotten any comments on my blog with a new citation. If you submit one to me, either I’ll show you that I already knew about that one, or we’ll both learn something.

All of this is why Descartes said language is the beginning of knowledge, as an introduction to his argument that language cannot be all of knowledge. But the textbook of a language’s grammar can also be a strawman argument. If you study Modern Standard Arabic or a Slavic language like Polish, and your teacher or text don’t deal with aspect (but use tense instead), you are being ripped off.

I have two examples on my blog, Biblical Hebrew, which I referred to above, and Classical Greek. Until the sack of Constantinople in the 1400s CE, the west knew Greek writings only in Latin translation.

When westerners started reading the Greek manuscripts brought to Europe by refugees from Constantinople, they learned the grammar from Armenian and Syriac (Aramaic) translations of a Greek work that discussed the verbs in terms of tenses. The author of this original grammar book, Thrax, was teaching Greek to a Latin-speaking audience, and he said that the verbs used a system of tenses, the way Latin does. Maybe he couldn’t make them understand it any other way. Maybe he didn’t see a difference. He even copied the Latin labels. And in that lies the problem, which I discuss on my blog thread about Classical Greek.

Am I saying that we have to go back and re-evaluate everything that has ever been said about Greek classics? No. When we know that translations are probably strawman arguments, there’s no sense in worrying about commentaries, a further step away from the source, or interpretations, a still further step away. Let’s go straight back to the source documents, study them in terms of a modern understanding of grammar and in their cultural context. (This is the same thing I said a couple of posts ago about reading the actual NIH documents.) On my Greek thread I made a start with Thucydides, and threw in a little Xenophon and Herodotus. You have a hundred years to roll your own.

21st Century Classical Greek -- dependent clause particles

Grammars of Classical Greek define dependent clauses as those starting with one of five particles, and being unable to stand alone to provide meaning.

However, in the very first chapter of Thucydides, a number of clauses cannot stand alone, but do not use these particles. I've talked about this chapter and these clauses before. In this chapter, they use personal gerundives. 

The problem isn't even thinking in Grenglish. In English, we can say, "Thinking it over, I decided I had to take action." You could not use "Thinking it over" stand-alone, because you could also say "they decided..." whatever. 

The problem is copying what your sources say, and your sources copied from theirs, maybe all the way back to Thrax. 

I said that I was looking deeper into this, and I have now gone through Thucydides looking at his usage of the five particles. My conclusion is

a/ they all have multiple purposes.

b/ their main usage is not at the start of dependent clauses but in idioms or common expressions that, unlike idioms, do translate in a fairly straightforward way.

c/ negation can follow all of them, and Thucydides uses both ou and mi to negate them, except for the purpose particle ina, for which he only uses mi.

Dependent clauses are just another case of grammarians hanging their claims on the obvious, like morphology in verbs, and getting things not even wrong sometimes.

Goodwin claims that some of them, like oste, require specific verb forms, like impersonal gerundives and indicative. This is false. Thucydides I 70.9 uses oste to subordinate a conditional using the epistemic. Also, remember that the impersonal gerundive has the nuance of "due and owing". Use with oste might seem a lesser emphasis than the indicative, as in most cases, but "such that an action is due and owing" is a different nuance than "such that an action happened".

And Smyth discusses succession of tenses, which means you have to follow, say, an augmented "tense" with a specific other "tense", but he ignores dependent clauses that don't use the particles.

In a stunning omission, none of the grammars discuss other particles which introduce dependent clauses, like ὥσπερ, which I ran across in Book IV of Thucydides while researching one of the particles they do discuss. This is a case of copying from sources which fail to address all the data. That's a failure of the Test of Occam's Razor.

But context was always the weakest part of the old grammars: they failed to examine every context and that is why LSJ has holes in it and the grammars are not even wrong sometimes.

The only grammar I found that agrees you can start a dependent clause with a personal or impersonal gerundive in Greek, the same as in English, is Kendall Easley's User-Friendly Greek. But it is aimed at the New Testament, which was written in koine Greek not Classical Greek. So what I said about Greek grammars stands. The people writing grammars of Classical Greek failed to do comprehensive work and thus to provide comprehensive -- or even correct -- information.

Why Fallacies are False -- 10, manipulation

All right. I’m back from my sources sidebar and back on the track of failing the Test of Occam’s Razor, data portion. I talked about sampling bias and other violations of the completeness requirement, including quoting out of context to hide inconvenient facts. Now I’m up to the misrepresentation problem. This includes photoshopping and creating deep fakes, as well as publishing years-old photos or videos and claiming it as evidence of a current event.

And I’m here to talk about something that won’t make sense to you unless you’re a language geek like me. Even if you are a language geek, you may profit from me making this point. I have a scientific (tested) theory to back me up, and I have about 30 posts on the subject on my blog.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/01/fact-checking-torah-two-which-are-four.html

But if you have been reading my threads on Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek, you know where I’m going.

First, there’s the fallacy. A strawman argument misrepresents what somebody said in the interests of arguing against them. People use it to try to refute an opponent, but it fails because it doesn’t refute what they actually said, it only refutes what the speaker pretends they said.

It’s related to the red herring fallacy, which tries to introduce a different subject that may or may not be related to the discussion, and argue about that while ignoring the original subject of the argument. Us old people may remember the OJ Simpson trial with the lawyer who held Simpson’s feet to the fire by saying “that’s not what I asked.” The lawyer was rejecting red herrings.

Where am I going with this?

There is no translation of material, especially non-scientific literature, that 100% represents the source. Every language has words for which there is no equivalent in the target language. Any translator who substitutes one word in the source by one word in the translation, fails, if the language of the translation does not have an equivalent. Even if there is, the translator may carelessly, ignorantly, or with intent use a different word, of which I will have an example later.

It gets worse. Every language has idioms, which combine words to get a meaning that the component words cannot express. Any translator who does a word-for-word substitution with an idiom produces nonsense.

And it goes on. If the language of the source document has a different grammatical structure than the language of the translation, nuances disappear in translation. If the source language has honorific morphology and the target does not, the translator has to add honorific words or lose the sense of the source document.

And finally, language expresses the worldview and culture of the people who grow up speaking that language. This is the fundamental reason why two countries understand each other so poorly on occasion. It even happens between English-speaking nations like the US and UK.

But it also applies within a country. I have evidence from multiple sources, that people in different subsets of a single culture think and speak differently. Both the way they word things and the content of what they say, differs from other subsets. When people sneer at speakers who change what they say and how, in different audiences, it shows ignorance of the need to “know your audience” and write or speak so that each specific audience will understand what you say. Your audience has to get it to agree with it, and you are responsible for helping them get it.

It came out in the Mendel Beilis trial. The prosecutors and judge kept trying to pinpoint dates and times when things happened. The witnesses – shopkeepers, laborers, their relatives – did not know what month it was when things happened; even if they could read, they did not use or did not have access to calendars. They thought in terms of seasons of the year or church observances. And some church observances are moveable feasts. The prosecutors spent court time harassing witnesses to sign off that a given event occurred on a given date, and it always failed. It cast doubt on the testimony of those witnesses. Beilis was acquitted for that and a number of other reasons.

The way you speak in tone and word, is a litmus test to see who is, or is willing to be, part of your cultural subset.

Now do you understand why you don’t understand what your teenagers say half the time?

Does this help explain to you why MAGA and non-MAGA cannot communicate en masse? If not, go back and reread all of these posts.

I’ll stop here and give you a chance to do that, and then I’ll pick up with something I’ve already discussed, from a new angle.

Why Fallacies are False -- 09, Epistemology

As I said, selecting your information sources to fit very stringent conditions (staying in your echo chamber) risks eliminating important data when you make your claims. It results in sampling bias, a fallacy that fails the Test of Occam’s Razor and makes your claims easy to debunk.

But there’s another problem with source selection, and it gets into formal epistemology.

Who do you trust?

I know somebody who regularly trusts people who provide false information and even commit fraud. This same person thinks op/eds are fact, including those printed by newspapers with known biases and poor track records, and falls for pretty much every urban legend around.

I know somebody who works for a science-based organization who has no clue about the importance of clinical studies, never met one in their life, and thinks MSM publications are valid evidence to support a claim about a medical conclusion.

And as we all know, there are people who fall for every fallacious conspiracy theory put out by their favorite organizations. MAGA and Fox are the most glaring example.

But at the same time, we know of otherwise reputable media like the Lancet, which have published studies that turned out to be flawed. One was the connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Another recent one was a paper using the known false Gaza Health Ministry death statistics. For the record, Lancet has retracted both of them.

MSM is not like that. They almost never retract. And they are untrustworthy about law, science, or religion. In 1980s cost-cutting, they fired their experts. They no longer have anybody to tell them what is significant in these fields. In the last 10 years or so, they began firing their expensive writers who knew how to do in-depth research; research takes time, and fails to keep up with trends. More and more, I find that articles read like some 22 year old was turned loose with Google. The writer lacked deep background; they may have been under deadline pressure, making good research impossible. So they turned out meaningless drivel. I rarely quote MSM in social media unless I dispute their claims – some outlets I don’t access at all.

There are people who either fail to realize how unreliable MSM is, or they ignore it in favor of getting attention on social media. I’ve busted their chops and sometimes gotten blocked because I bruised their egos. Some of these same people whine about disinformation while putting it out.

People also stick with what they know, whether because of ego or because they live in an echo chamber. Some people from the glasnost period are still stuck in that mindset and when I hear them give radio interviews, I ignore what they say. You want names? I can give you a couple.

And then there’s Wikipedia. Well, really, there are all encyclopedias. This comes from a skeet exchange; the other person said they use encyclopedias as a start, and the bibliography for more information. Not realizing that the bibliography was the starting point for the false or debunked facts in the article. Let alone what I said last week about books not counting as evidence of expertise. Let alone that the bibliography books or articles could be filled with fallacies, just like the article. All of which I pointed out in my skeets.

This all started from an announcement that Encyclopedia Britannica was going AI. Well, the old EB had falsehood and fallacy based articles, and AI will not make it better.

The closer your source is to whoever generated the data, the more trustworthy it is. I’ll say this again in a different way later.

So you should be reading the papers at NIH, not listening to a 30-second statement on radio, if you want the truth about weight loss.

Now, I can hear you saying, “But I don’t understand that stuff.” What’s that old song? When You’ve Only Got A Hundred Years to Live? Is it really OK for people to lie to you for a hundred years, as long as you don’t have to learn anything you didn’t know before?

If you’re interested in a subject, and you don’t want people to lie to you, you have to become the expert. You have to keep a tickler file of reports. Then you have to go to a site called Retraction Watch.

Anything in your tickler file that shows up there, you need to dump.

And you need to review your ticklers from time to time. If one of them bucks the trend, red-flag it in case it’s based on false data. Dump it when it gets formally debunked.

All of which is hard to do. But if we don’t do it, we wind up failing the Test of Occam’s Razor when our data gets debunked. An old article, claiming that philology shows the Indo-Europeans originated in and around the Holy Land, is debunked by 21^st century DNA hard evidence. (I always ignore philology; I have a post for that.)

Learn which people are not making their best efforts, starting with analyzing their claims in case they used fallacies.

The ones that seem to be making their best effort, go in your tickler file – but you have to dump them if they get debunked.

It’s called life-long learning. It’s recommended for preventing Alzheimer’s, along with eating right and exercising.

Look, I admit I have a problem. I’m cursed with being old, and having read since I was four, and having a good memory and a logical mind. About age 15 I got tired of being lied to so as to control my ideas and behavior, so that makes me a tight-ass about these things. Time after time, curating my sources of information has helped me avoid problems that other people have. My faults have saved my money, my time, maybe my life. But that’s just me.

21st Century Classical Greek -- dependent clauses

So I'm going back to fill in gaps in what I wrote about how bad the old Greek grammars are and I think I have objective data for why their discussions of dependent clauses are so bad. Now that you know how geeky this post will be, you can stop reading.

The old description of dependent clauses required them to start with particles like ὡς  or ὅτι (there are three others). But that is Grenglish. In English, we require dependent clauses to start with words identifying either its function in the sentence, or relative pronouns or subordinating conjunctions. Part of the reason is our lack of case markers which, in Greek, identify the antecedents of the subjects of dependent clauses.

In Classical Greek, you get personal gerundives in the same gender, case and number as their subject, which is elsewhere in the sentence, that introduce dependent clauses. You find them in Peloponnesian War I 1.1. with the personal gerundives agreeing with Thoukidides, that add information. They have none of the particles.

Where you get the particles, other things are happening in the sentence.

a) The dependent clause has a subject which immediately precedes it in a different case. That's the clause right after "Peloponnesians and Athenians". It reinforces that the subject of the dependent clause is the same as the last topic mentioned.

b) The dependent clause has a different subject from the clause it depends on, or which is not the last topic mentioned. So tekmairomenos refers to Thucydides, but the dependent clause has "the Peloponnesians and Athenians" understood to be the subject.

The dependent clause may itself be subordinate to a dependent clause; you have this in the text I refer to in (b).

This description of subordinate clauses shows that one use of an is a case of (b), making it a subordinating article IN SOME CONTEXTS. In these contexts there are only two possible subjects for the dependent clause, and in a vague way this relates to using an to introduce the "then" of a conditional which, of course, has only an "if" statement and a "then" statement (although one of them may be suppressed). 

(a) and (b) describe where you NEED the particles. You CAN have a dependent clause without a particle, which all the old grammarians ignore because first, their sources ignored it and, second, they were thinking in Grenglish. Third, they regarded personal gerundives as "absolutes", usually expressing time -- except for the -oi case. They denied that "nominative absolutes" existed, although you will find the term in English grammar. 

I'm going to keep studying this. In particular, I want to see if you can only use ὡς immediately after the antecedent of the subject of the dependent clause, while other particles have some other relationship to their antecedent the way an does. If I find other uses for the particles or I find examples of these usages that don't have a particle, I'll tell you. I'll also tell you if I find examples where ὡς after a topic, introduces a dependent clause which does not have that topic as its subject.

So once again, the point is that Classical Greek is not some poor cousin of Latin or some close relative of English. It is DIFFERENT and deserves to be treated on its own merits.