tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3559910.post5802860485663006914..comments2024-02-17T19:58:47.311-05:00Comments on Textuality: Kuzari: A Reply to Dovid Kornreich on Evidence and HypothesesLarry Tannerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14642725101009530480noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3559910.post-83167097375468061162011-07-01T10:18:10.154-04:002011-07-01T10:18:10.154-04:00Brian,
Your first point is, of course, valid. I h...Brian,<br /><br />Your first point is, of course, valid. I hope for the indulgence of my readers in understanding that for the sake of brevity and clarity I am talking about putative sources. To use your example, I am always saying "I saw [what appeared to be but which I cannot verify with absolute certainty at this time] a homeless man today."<br /><br />So, given the assumption of different sources--that is with multiple sources as our provisional hypothesis--the appearance of archaic language forms, the commonality of expressions and concerns across extra-Torah books, etc. can be explained in an intellectually satisfying way. The pattern of the languages can be used to suggest multiple sources. The distribution of content with apparent relationship to history and to other content in the Bible also suggests multiple sources. And so on. What's interesting is that the different lines of evidence suggest roughly the same number and type of sources. <br /><br />In your next point, I'm not sure how you would be able to extrapolate the future of a particular language. Words can change meanings and acquire very new ones. They can change part of speech. The syntax can change. The sounds, morphology, and pronunciation can change. Contact with other cultures and technologies can affect vocabulary and register. I wouldn't think it possible for a person to make consistent use of either archaic or future language forms. I would love to see an experiment where someone attempted to write about 10K-50K words in the style of colonial New England elite. Could such a text be written well enough to fool scholars and casual observers?<br /><br />Finally, I don't know that DK will agree that the text "has all of the signs of being a mishmash of consistent, regular human works of coherent authorship." DK may argue that the text has two levels, both of which must be taken into account equally. T1 is the plain meaning of the statements, insofar as we can agree on what's plain and what the boundaries of statements are. T2 is the moral and practical teaching of the text. Apparent contradictions at the T1 level can be resolved at the T2 level. But I want to hear DK's actual answer. <br /><br />As to what I think is your larger argument: We cannot fully rule out that the Torah is the product of a single mind who crafted the text to appear as a composite work assembled over centuries. But it's highly impossible, perhaps practically so, in our as-yet-unformulated model of textual production.<br /><br />In this model, individual authors have have personal styles of derived from the compositional situation, the present state of the language, the technologies of textual production and dissemination, prevailing ideologies of the self and community, and the social institutions that authorize textual production.<br /><br />You can't just imagine a single author. You also have to imagine an early Israel that receives his text and accepts it. You have to imagine how a person, long before the concept of "authorship" is ever formulated, finds the time and space to compose in solitude as an author, and then the time to present the full-borne text to the political elite or the people broadly.<br /><br />What you need, then, is a new model of textual production and a new narrative of the history behind it.<br /><br />But if we agree on the model that I've hinted at, wherein texts encode various elements from their historical moment(s) of composition, then I. b) is not significant enough to carry forward after careful consideration.Larry Tannerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14642725101009530480noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3559910.post-57581480048851120402011-07-01T08:10:40.322-04:002011-07-01T08:10:40.322-04:00"The different sources reflect the Hebrew lan...<i>"The <b>different sources reflect</b> the Hebrew language of several distinct periods...Relationships <b>among the sources</b> to each other and to history (p. 18): We see that each source <b>has connections to</b> specific circumstances in history and to other sources. J <b>appears connected to</b> the kingdom of Judah in the south of Israel...D <b>is associated</b>, as we have previously discussed, with the reign of Josiah, king of Judah from 640-609 BCE. Finally, the P source <b>has a consistent relationship with</b> the prior sources J and E."<br /><br />"(1) Do you agree that the observations are valid?"</i><br /><br />Depending on how they are phrased some of the observations might be presuming the conclusion while others do not. "I saw a homeless man today" presumes one didn't see a <a href="http://blog.hostgator.com/2007/11/28/hostgator-ceo-becomes-homeless/" rel="nofollow"> CEO pretending to be homeless</a>. <br /><br />Does the word "reflect" in the following sentence capture what would be going on if I extrapolated the development of language, wrote a text in today's English, wrote a text in the language of 100 years from now, and jumbled the texts together: "the combined text reflects the English language of distinct periods." I'm not sure. What if I were smart enough to jumble them in my head, as I was writing them, such that there were never two separate texts? Would there be "different sources"?<br /><br /><i>"(2) What caused the text to be the way it appears to us in these observations?"</i><br /><br />The text <br /><br />I. has all of the signs of being a mishmash of consistent, regular human works of coherent authorship or <br />II. does not? <br /><br />If I., is it because: <br /><br />a) it was created by the crude combination of consistent, regular, human works of coherent authorship; <br />b) of the intent of a single author to make it look exactly as if it were a); <br />c) unfathomable coincidence? <br /><br />If I. b), then <br /><br />i. the single author was human or <br />ii. the single author was non-human? <br /><br />If I. b) ii., the non-human author <br />1. is restricted by laws of physics or <br />2. unrestricted by laws of physics?<br /><br />Establishing I. ever more firmly in the face of II. does nothing to address I. b) and its problems.Brianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11958115795753496384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3559910.post-13662912636508130012011-06-30T15:54:22.850-04:002011-06-30T15:54:22.850-04:00Ah, but hold on. Intent to communicate is differen...Ah, but hold on. Intent to communicate is different than intended message. <br /><br />If we agree that such-and-such is a text, then we may also agree that the author(s) had an intent to communicate something. Yet we may never agree as to the what and why of the author(s).<br /><br />Intent to communicate is, by itself, not especially workable.<br /><br />We agree that the Torah is a text or a composite text. Whatever. We therefore agree that there are one or more intents to communicate.<br /><br />I am not asking DK to give me an answer of intent for the seven lines of evidence. I am asking him two questions: (1) Do you agree that the observations are valid? and (2) What caused the text to be the way it appears to us in these observations?<br /><br />Our job as scholars is to identify features, identify possible causes of these features, and try to evaluate which causes are most likely. We are not making, nor are we demanding, arguments from ignorance. On the contrary, we are trying to make the strongest, most reliable inferences we can based on the little that we actually do know.Larry Tannerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14642725101009530480noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3559910.post-20348075800570030782011-06-30T14:02:03.721-04:002011-06-30T14:02:03.721-04:00"Not sure I read you right, but some say that...<i>"Not sure I read you right, but some say that to posit authorial intent is always a fallacy (i.e., the intentional fallacy)."</i><br /><br />Regardless of whether or not authorial intent is always important or necessary, one can't assume about any given thing that its cause was not intent, and furthermore one can't demand that a third party tell you a plausible intent. One has to be open to the idea that there was an intent regardless of whether or not one can think of a plausible one.<br /><br />"How do you explain that the text looks exactly like one made by combining multiple human sources?"<br /><br />"God did it."<br /><br />"Why would he do such a thing?!"<br /><br />"I can't imagine, but are you implying that were I to present you with a good reason one might have to fake the evidence just so (or why a totally different process would result in the same appearance), you would no longer be troubled by the fact that the text 'looks man-made? And if not, why did you ask?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"So you're saying our inability to imagine a reason is conclusive reason to say it doesn't exist? I'm flattered. Most arguments from ignorance rely merely on the speaker's assumption of having all relevant knowledge, but here you merely assume that between us we have all relevant knowledge."Brianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11958115795753496384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3559910.post-11861544268756070072011-06-30T12:46:54.115-04:002011-06-30T12:46:54.115-04:00Are the seven lines of evidence uncontroversial? I...Are the seven lines of evidence uncontroversial? I wouldn't have thought so, but I don't get around much. I have seen ""different sources use different names for God" paraded around, but this is not actually what DH claims. What I want is responses to the DH as I understand it through Friedman and others. <br /><br />"Once we know that we are dealing with a text, the explanation that always works is the intent of the author, which we don't have to stipulate."<br /><br />Not sure I read you right, but some say that to posit authorial intent is always a fallacy (i.e., the intentional fallacy). Even the authors themselves are not able to settle intent. Dennett has a nice article on this.Larry Tannerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14642725101009530480noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3559910.post-31853957931525661842011-06-30T11:55:04.352-04:002011-06-30T11:55:04.352-04:00"...reconstruct the textual history of Deuter...<i>"...reconstruct the textual history of Deuteronomy--which do not commit logical fallacies. Namely: of assuming the conclusion at the outset."<br /><br />"Do modern biblical scholars such as Friedman presume the truth of the Documentary Hypothesis at the outset? I think that Friedman's statements in the "Continuity of texts" line of evidence (#4) argues against circularity."</i><br /><br />Indisputably not every element of the conclusion is assumed at the outset. Hence, the appearance of circularity is easy to avoid. However, one wouldn't want to assume anything false, and so must examine assumptions in the big picture model.<br /><br />The secular approach clearly does not at all assume the DH. However, secular scholars (at least appear to) assume the falsity of supernatural hypotheses. We should examine their reasons for doing so and replace that (apparent) assumption with reasoned conclusions.<br /><br /><br /><i>1. Are the seven observations valid? Which ones are not, and why not?</i><br /><br />It's unfortunate that most of the post elaborates on these when they are not very controversial. <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-algorithm-sheds-light-bible-163128454.html" rel="nofollow"> A computer program </a>recently provided evidence from outside biblical scholarship that it parses the texts coherently and along its natural joints. <br /><br /><br /><i>2. Of the observations that are valid, how do you explain what we see in the text?</i><br /><br />Explanation after the fact is easy, as through every set of data there is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_interpolation#Uniqueness_of_the_interpolating_polynomial" rel="nofollow">perfectly fitting explanatory function</a>. Once we know that we are dealing with a text, the explanation that always works is the intent of the author, which we don't have to stipulate. To demand it would be to make an argument from ignorance.<br /><br /><i>3. How do your explanations better account for the observations than explanations under the Documentary Hypothesis?<br />4. How would you modify or alter the big-picture model I developed earlier in this post?</i><br /><br />This is where the action is.<br /><br /><br /><i>Assuming [one] subscribe[s] to a version of the Divine Inspiration Hypothesis, how [would one] avoid assuming its truth when...reasoning about what [one] observe[s] in the Bible and in the sacred works of other religions?</i><br /><br />Regarding other religions, regardless of one's criteria it will be possible to rate religions by that set of criteria and observe that they have different likelihoods. This is true even for reasoning that does not explicitly assume the truth of one religion.<br /><br />The same basically applies when comparing religious to non-religious explanations, except less obviously.<br /><br />Note that one can observe which starting assumptions ought to lead to which conclusions, and subjectively select to espouse the neutral criteria that supports one's favored belief, even if the reasons for this selection were assumptions explicitly and illegitimately declaring the truth of a system.<br /><br />E.g., if my society demands I believe in Australia, I may notice that modern science compels and justifies belief in Australia, and become an advocate of science. Had my society demanded belief in Atlantis, I would have noticed (consciously or subconsciously) that science is in tension with that belief and believed in something else.<br /><br />It is thereby not surprising to find facially neutral premises invoked by all people believing things. It is a special trait of Christianity to say faith is sufficient justification. Not an endearing one.Brianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11958115795753496384noreply@blogger.com