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.