Misunderstanding and Correction or Misrepresentation and Deception

This topic is only about the misunderstanding in the Money Isn't a False God between myself and Crashfrog. It is not about whether one's position concerning the money and false gods is correct or not. It is not about issues my opponent has had in other threads.In Message 262, I officially reported a discussion problem and asked for an official determination. I didn't get one. A few brave souls have put forth their views of the situation and found in my favor. Many thanks.Although my opponent claims to be capable of accepting correction, he has yet to concede that he may have misunderstood what I wrote in Message 27.Here is a snapshot of the text in question: A little insight into my thought process when replying. I responded to the question first and purposely mirrored the wording of my opponents question in my response to reemphasize my position. The word construe is not a word I tend to use at EvC. Responding to the rest of the paragraph was an afterthought and the remaining part of the paragraph was added to the quote before posting along with the response to that portion of the paragraph.The questions to be addressed by participants in this thread are:1. In the snapshot above did I agree that worshiping false gods doesn't mean temples and prostrate worship and that it means putting material concerns ahead of spiritual ones as my opponent contends in Message 30 and Message 39?or2. Did I respond to the question as I contend in my explanation in Message 40?If my opponent still feels there is deceit and misrepresentation, then he needs to provide evidence of such intent.As per the rules of this forum, please address the position and do not attack the person. This thread is strictly about the snapshot above and whether it was a source of misunderstanding or the beginning of deception.Edited by purpledawn, : Typo and LinksEdited by purpledawn, : No reason given.

I find this issue fascinating because people wonder why creationists doesn't change their belief when confronted with evidence to the contrary.In this instance we have an atheist who had a belief for less than 3 hours before being corrected and can't change his point of view when confronted with evidence.Food for thought: If it is this difficult for an atheist to let go of a new incorrect belief, how much harder will it be for a creationist to let go of a belief they may have held for decades?

What evidence?You've merely asserted after the fact that I was mistaken in how I interpreted your words.But I believe I was not, and that you are making that assertion falsely because you wish to backpedal from a position you adopted without thinking about it. So, I don't believe you.What evidence can you provide that actually supports your assertion that you meant something other than what you said?

I have provided the evidence; it's the difference between what you said, and what you later insisted you had actually meant.

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What evidence can you provide that actually supports your assertion that you meant something other than what you said?

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I provided the evidence in Message 1 of this thread.I didn't mean something other than what I said. Your error is connecting my answer to the paragraph and not the question as it was intended.Edited by purpledawn, : Subtitle

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I have provided the evidence; it's the difference between what you said, and what you later insisted you had actually meant.

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Since this thread is addressing a disagreement that has taken place in two other threads, please provide links to posts you feel contain your evidence.The only evidence you've provided in the other two threads is evidence of why you misunderstood my response. Even PaulK in Message 264 and Bailey in Message 42 agree that I was responding to the question and not the paragraph.You haven't shown evidence that I have been deceitful. You believe I've been deceitful, but you haven't shown evidence that I have.Just because you misunderstood what I wrote, doesn't mean I've been deceitful.

No, you only provided the assertion. So you say, but I continue to not believe you.

And I explained how their interpretation was necessarily in error. If you had replied to the question and not tot he paragraph, you would not have quoted the paragraph and then replied to it.Because your reply follows the paragraph and not the question, I'm able to determine that you were replying to the paragraph and not the question.If you quoted the paragraph by mistake, that's fine; I'm willing to concede that your actions cause you to have said something other than what you intended. Of course, if that's the case, it looks a little suspicious that you waited so long to try to address the confusion you caused.I do genuinely think it's possible for us to arrive at a resolution of this disagreement but it's going to have to be based on you, overcoming your irrational unwillingness to admit that I'm right about something.

Your explanation is evidence of why you misunderstood my response. You expected a certain layout and I didn't follow that layout. On this board, we don't have to separate individual sentences.Remember, I'm the author of what I wrote. I provided insight into my thought process in Message 1. My response mirrored the words from your question.The two sentences don't make sense if they both refer to the paragraph minus the question. They would contradict each other.There was no major time lapse between your posts and my correction of your error, so that's just an excuse. If you disagree, please show me the timeframe you feel is questionable.I agree that you may have viewed the response to the question as a response to the paragraph. Unfortunately that is the wrong way to read it, and my guess is that you didn't even read the sentence that followed which would contradict the first sentence.Why do you refuse to believe that I responded to the question?

On this board, replies to material follow the quoted material, and that's the format that I expected you were following because that's the format you have always followed, and continue to follow even in this thread. Are you saying that you accidentally responded to the paragraph instead of to the question?If that's the case, I can accept that your mistake caused you to pretty substantially misrepresent your own position.If that's the case, though, why did you wait so long to correct the obvious misunderstanding? I don't perceive them as being in any particular contradiction; I perceive one as an unsuccessful attempt to clarify the other.It is, frankly, not uncommon for you to unintentionally say things that are contradictory or simply unclear. Poor or unclear writing is hardly uncharacteristic of you. So what? That doesn't place you in any particularly privileged seat when it comes to what you meant, and it certainly doesn't obligate me to take your assertions about what you meant at face-value or privilege them ahead of what you actually said. Because you replied to the paragraph. Ergo, you responded to the paragraph. If you did so by mistake I'm prepared to accept that, but it leaves unexplained why you allowed the discussion to continue for so long on the basis of the obvious misunderstanding you'd caused. Surely it was immediately obvious that I was replying to you as though you'd replied to the paragraph and not to the question?

Let me get this straight...Your position is that because PD wrote this line:

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I think it is an appropriate way to construe it.

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directly after all this from you:

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But don't you think that's a pretty narrow way to construe it these days? There's not a lot of competition for Christianity anymore, at least not among polytheistic religions. That's the reason that the passage in Jeremiah is interpreted, in modern theology, to refer to not letting shallow material concerns, like wealth, power, prestige, or influence, supersede more important spiritual concerns.

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Then that means that she *had* to be saying that "There's not a lot of competition for Christianity anymore, at least not among polytheistic religions. That's the reason that the passage in Jeremiah is interpreted, in modern theology, to refer to not letting shallow material concerns, like wealth, power, prestige, or influence, supersede more important spiritual concerns" was the appropriate way to consture it?Also, you're saying that it is impossible that she was responding to "But don't you think that's a pretty narrow way to construe it these days?" with a disagreement that 'no, it wasn't narrow, it was reasonable'?How could you possibly be so confident unless you had the ability to read her mind?To me, she intended either this: or this: And in no way do I see her as agreeing with this line whatsoever:

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There's not a lot of competition for Christianity anymore, at least not among polytheistic religions. That's the reason that the passage in Jeremiah is interpreted, in modern theology, to refer to not letting shallow material concerns, like wealth, power, prestige, or influence, supersede more important spiritual concerns.

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Seriously, how the hell not? Nobody *BUT* her can know what she meant... you've got to be the most arrogant person on this board now that Rrhain is gone... for good I hope.Seriously, how can you possible think that you know more about what a person meant than the person who actually wrote it? That's gotta be the stupidest things I've every seen you type on this forum.I don't think you believe that one bit but are instead just being a cocky little asshole troll. I think I might just have lost all confidence in believing anything you will ever write again. This is all just one big joke to you and you're sitting there laughing your ass off because people are actually taking you a little bit seriously and thinking you mean what you write.You *are* a arrogant jerk.

Yes. Because "I think that's an appropriate way to construe it" is a sentence that signals agreement with whatever was just said. Just like if you said:

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Isn't it true that Pride and Prejudice is made more awesome by the presence of zombies?

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and then I replied

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I think that's an appropriate way to construe it.

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You would be correct in interpreting me as indicating agreement."I think that's an appropriate way to construe it" is a sentence that clearly indicates agreement. If PD had really meant to reply to the question in the negative, she would have written a negative sentence that followed the question, not a positive sentence that followed a paragraph. Because I have the ability to read her words. What she actually wrote is much more reliable guide to what she meant when she wrote it than anything she has later to say about what she meant when she wrote it. If she genuinely made an error in expressing her intent, that's fine. If that really happened I've stated several times that I'm prepared to accept it.But, she's adamant that she said exactly what she intended to say. Thus, I'm forced to reject her subsequent insistence that I've somehow misinterpreted her. She said what she intended to say - by her own admission! - and what she said was that she agreed with how I'd construed the passage. Because it's not. The author dies as soon as he writes. The person you were when you wrote something isn't the person you are, now, to later talk about writing it. The author's statements of intention are really irrelevant to the interpretation of the text.Seriously, I can't be the only one here trained in literary criticism, can I? You've honestly never heard of the Intentional Fallacy?

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Intentional fallacy, in literary criticism, addresses the assumption that the meaning intended by the author of a literary work is of primary importance. By characterizing this assumption as a "fallacy", a critic suggests that the author's intention is not important. The term is an important principle of New Criticism and was first used by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their essay "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946 rev. 1954): "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." The phrase "intentional fallacy" is somewhat ambiguous, but it means "a fallacy about intent" and not "a fallacy committed on purpose."

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Reasons for not committing the Intentional Fallacy:

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(1) Internal evidence. Internal evidence is the actual details present inside a given work. The apparent content of a work is the internal evidence, including any historical knowledge and past expertise or experience with the kind of art being interpreted that is required to understand what that work is: its forms and traditions. The form of epic poetry, the meter, quotations etc. are internal to the work. This information is internal to the type (or genre) of art that is being examined, and includes those things physically present in the work itself. Analysis of an artwork based on internal evidence never presents an intentional fallacy.

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(2) External evidence. What is not literally contained in the work itself is external to that work, including all statements the artist made privately or published in journals about the work, or in conversations, e-mail, etc. External evidence is concerned with claims about why the artist made the work: reasons external to the fact of the work in itself. Evidence of this type is directly concerned with what the artist may have intended to do even or especially when it is not apparent from the work itself, and is an example of an intentional fallacy.

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(3) Contextual evidence. The third type of evidence concerns any meanings produced from a particular work's relationship to other art made by the same artistincluding its exhibition (where, when and by whom). The use of biographical information in a discussion of an artwork does not necessarily indicate an intentional fallacy. The meaning of an artist's work may be affected by the particulars of who does the work (identity) without necessarily that interpretation as an intentional fallacy.

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Thus, a text's internal evidence the words themselves, and their meanings is fair game for literary analysis. External evidence anything not contained within the text itself, such as information about the poet's life belongs to literary biography, not literary criticism. Preoccupation with the author "leads away from the poem."

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_FallacyNow, we're not talking about poetry, here, but we are interpreting language. Thus it's clear that committing the Intentional Fallacy - as PD would have us do - actually leads us away from the true meaning of what they meant. It's not a guide to the meaning of what people are saying to take their stated intentions into account; it actually conceals what they may have meant. Because I'm not committing the Intentional Fallacy, but they are. Just because you wrote something, doesn't give you any particular insight into what it meant when you wrote it. Obviously. Not in the least. I'm continually surprised by this insistence that I'm somehow arrogant. I hardly know anything at all - I'm just a lot less credulous, apparently, than you. But I'm continually suspicious of my own ability to accurately apprehend things. That's why I insist on good evidence for things I believe are true and don't simply take people's word for things.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

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On this board, replies to material follow the quoted material, and that's the format that I expected you were following because that's the format you have always followed, and continue to follow even in this thread.

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That's the format I followed.

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Are you saying that you accidentally responded to the paragraph instead of to the question?

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No.

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It is, frankly, not uncommon for you to unintentionally say things that are contradictory or simply unclear. Poor or unclear writing is hardly uncharacteristic of you.

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Please show evidence of this with links.

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So what? That doesn't place you in any particularly privileged seat when it comes to what you meant, and it certainly doesn't obligate me to take your assertions about what you meant at face-value or privilege them ahead of what you actually said.

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This leads one to believe you are behaving this way on purpose. As a supposed English Major and science guy, you know better than that. Your slip is showing.

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Because you replied to the paragraph. Ergo, you responded to the paragraph. If you did so by mistake I'm prepared to accept that, but it leaves unexplained why you allowed the discussion to continue for so long on the basis of the obvious misunderstanding you'd caused. Surely it was immediately obvious that I was replying to you as though you'd replied to the paragraph and not to the question?

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You still haven't shown that a long period of time has passed. You have been shown otherwise. (Even though I quoted the whole paragraph, I bet you can tell which sentence I'm actually replying to.)I haven't figured out whether the first mistake was intentional or a real mistake, but the refusal to take correction is obviously intentional. You're creating conflict to argue for the sake of arguing. That is not the spirit of debate on this board.

And just to add to this, I believe I'm particular right in this view because it's what we're asked to do by the Forum Guidelines:

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Always treat other members with respect. Argue the position, not the person.

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Argue the position, not the person. In this case, preoccupation with the person - with their intent - leads us away from the positions. And it's the positions we're asked to address, not the person.

That's correct. You quoted material, and then you replied to that material.You quoted a paragraph and then you replied to that paragraph. So I was correct in how I originally interpreted you. So you intentionally responded to the paragraph instead of to the question. Um, this is precisely what I was instructed as an English major - how to interpret text without preoccupation with author biography. As I've just explained to CS what I was instructed in as an English major was not to commit the Intentional Fallacy, as you are now asking me to do. My recollection is that several posts over several days elapsed in between my reply indicating that I had interpreted you as assenting to a paragraph instead of contradicting a question and your first insistence that I had "misrepresented" you, and that your insistence that I misrepresented you began only when I showed you how positions you had indicated assent to had directly contradicted the position you opened the thread to defend. You're responding to the paragraph. When you want to answer questions, you quote only the question - as you've done in this very post: