Valla and the temporal Arrow

Thinking about interpretation of historical events for long will make one tend into the direction of increasing under-determination. But there are a few things that work like a hard pruning shear and that are not really debated. These have to do with some of the dimensions of our cognition, to put it in terms of Kantian categories, namely that temporally separate things only have one direction of dependence; and that the same macroscopic object cannot be at two locations (that share no spatial overlap) at the same point in time. 

That was basically all that Lorenzo Valla used to dismantle the claims behind the forged Donation of Constantine to Pope Sylvester. Valla argued that certain phrases were in use during the reign of Constantine and certain phrases were not. For example, during the time of Constantine, there were no satraps. Since the Donation assumes that there were satraps as a political title and role, the text shows no understanding of the time of Constantine and therefore cannot be from the time of the reign. 

What that means for an interpretation then is that we have a situation where we have run out of alternatives and ruled them out. As in the old Peanuts joke, there are no oceans (now) in Kansas, nor in North Dakota, nor in Colorado, nor in Arizona, nor in Utah, nor in Wyoming. Given that there is a finite number of states, we can eventually iterate over all of them and determine if they have oceans or not. Thus with the writings from the time of Constantine; eventually we can look through all of them and come up with something like word counts for satrap for each of them. And we can then make a positive statement of an absence: there are no documents from the time of Constantine that recognize satrap as a political title.

We of course immediately see the problem. How did we get this set of dated documents? By some method like Valla's, involving terminus ante quem and terminus post quem. Presumably involving the same logic that Valla just used. For clearly our set of documents cannot use the Donatio itself. There is then a petitio principii in the sense that we already need to exclude the document under consideration in order to make the determination.

But that may be overplaying the hand of the other side. Surely it is good cross-validation practice to go through a canon of writings and see how well, if one document is withheld during training, the separated document holds up when looking at all the other ones as the training corpus. Or perhaps one can cluster the documents by the language and find that the Donatio is an outlier along several dimensions. There is a way that this determination can be made that is not completely dependent on begging the question.

Perhaps the example of the satrap is not the best one either, because that term did exist before Constantine and had become part of the historical discourse since Herodotus (Book III, 89-93).

Modeling the under-determination

The most important change that we need to make in talking about historiographical interpretation is that we know what is true. We do not know what is true, what really happened, and similar.

At the same time, we have to insist that some interpretations are false. As Umberto Eco pointed out long ago, if no interpretation is false, then every text is the same text, and there is only one text. The phone book of Vienna from 1973 is the same thing as Lenin's writings. If we cannot reject an interpretation, then there is no way to differentiate them, and it is all the same.

That combination of there being no true one answer but many wrong answers must strike many people as strange because most people know that not-true is false and not-false is true. Due to this symmetry that setup is then confusing.

The first point to make then is that this switch from true to false using negation only works in the case of a complete disjunction. We already said that we want to assume that not all texts are the same text, so we have at least two interpretations. So if the competing interpretations A and B are up for discussion, and we can show not-A, then the disjunction allows us to conclude B. So if two people Alice and Bea are locked in a room with a hard piece of candy, and the candy is gone, and we can prove that Alice did not eat it, then Bea must have eaten it. 

For most historical events, however, this strategy fails because the disjunction of interpretations remains open. As David Hume pointed out in Dialogs concerning Natural Religion, some of these either-or arguments suffer from a lack of alternatives or become far from clear when other alternatives are considered (famously, that the world might be like a plant). The most obvious present day case is the restricted alternative between evolution and intelligent design, where the problems of evolution only can imply an affirmation of intelligent design if there are no competing interpretations.

So for the first measure of approximation, historiography cannot show what the true narrative is, only that there are false narratives because the disjunction of interpretations is not complete. Notice that psychologically, this may still be a problem, because a very large number of competing interpretations is almost an attack on conceptual resources, an interpretative denial-of-service strategy.

The next question then becomes however, how to show that an interpretation is false. Suppose that our hard candy contains a substance that some people have allergic reactions to. Suppose further that Alice has in the past shown allergic reactions. Then we can mount an argument that either Alice would have had an allergic reaction or that Alice did not eat the hard candy. Very quickly the devil shows itself in all the details as the tree of dependence and justification begins to extend downward into the minutiae of cellular biology, chemistry, and medicine of human food allergies. And that is just the natural science side of the problem. There are also other events that are historical in that chain, that have the same disjunction of interpretations intervening between the chemical processes, say, and the conclusions that we wish to draw for adjudicating between A and B. Perhaps Alice's prior episode was misdiagnosed; perhaps the reaction was caused by another allergenic substance; perhaps the evidence for that episode is suspect (Alice's grandmother told her, because Alice was too young at the time to remember herself). 

However to resolve the conundrum of the interpretative process, what should be clear though is that we need to be ready to accommodate a shift in the truth value of our supports at any point in time. Precisely because the supports of the sub-theories might shift with any new piece of evidence; precisely because none of these matters are monotonic in the logical sense of the word---truth maintenance as part of the ongoing process of rejustification in the face of discovery becomes paramount. 

Some Birthday Stories

Consider this story template to generate yes/no questions:

On May 12, [2020//1930/1890], [Emma/Charles] celebrated their [10th/20th/40th/80th] birthday in London. When their sibling [Charles/Emma] ate the [cake/pony/Faberge egg/iPhone], the birthday child cried. Does that surprise you?

Stories are surprising when the mix of ingredients does not go together. Some of these incongruencies would be temporal: An iPhone in 1930 (or a dodo bird at any of the offered points in time, having become extinct in the 16th century already). 

Some of these incongruencies would be structural: eating a pony or a Faberge egg is hard work and could not be accomplished quickly. 

Some of these would be social conventions surrounding emotions: a 40-year old man in 1890 London, that is Victorian society, would be expected not to cry over the loss of a birthday present, but a 40-year old woman may well be expected to. 

Some of these might be unusual but acceptable: though a Faberge egg cannot be eaten (despite what it name seems to imply to a noun tagger), it is also an odd present for a 10-year old (possibly excepting upper aristocracy). Eventually, as the age of the celebrated person increases, the presence of a sibling itself becomes unlikely without additional information.

Meandering and the Asymmetry of Overdetermination

The meandering nature of historiographical reconstruction has occurred to anyone who has worked in that field at all. One starts out at a general topic, such as the sources of a historical painting or the origins of Mendelian experimentation, and finds oneself, a couple of units of effort later, in the middle of contemplating the household receipts and textual editions (not to mention X-rays of the painting under consideration) or computing the total number of pea plants that the Moravian monetary garden (plus glass house) might have held or the names and origin of Mendel's four assistants (mostly lay brothers).

How did one get there?

Perhaps the most straightforward suggestion is afforded by David Lewis and his observation on the asymmetry of overdetermination of actual worlds (1973). The observation here is the plurality of traces that causal events leave and the point is to allow the philosopher by comparison to establish the causal relationship with respect to the effects. 

At issue is not the correctness of Lewis' observation per se but the proposal that actions in the real world that are causal leave a plurality of traces that extend into the historical record in a bewildering variety of ways. (The image of ripples on a pond is usually exercised at this point in the discussion.) All the same, time is the great destroyer and as the spans increase and other ripples chase across the pond, the traces become effaced. The artist's studio has disappeared, and so have his tools, materials and assistants; the Mendelian fields and glasshouse, should they have survived at all, were preserved only due to the conservative nature of the institution where he experimented. The historian is thus faced with "temporal cluster bombing" that works counter to the very tracing of the effect chains the historian wishes to undertake. At the same time, if the event was "big" enough (the extinction of the dinosaurs by meteorite comes to mind) the large number of traces prevents the erasure of every single detail---too much shocked quartz, too much iridium, too little volcanic activity in the Deccan traps.

My mother still remembers where she was and what she was doing the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, even though she was then an Austrian teen. It would be difficult to erase all traces, to spill damnatio memoriae on all the causal lines, that reverberated through the global village of modern media when that US president died. Diaries, letters, mementos, not to mention an avalanche of conspiracy theories all take their origin in that event. 

It is this situation that is both the possibility of performing historiographical research over the ages and the impossibility of focusing the ontology of investigation up front, as the lack of readier-made traces and the ability to decide between competing interpretations will push the historian farther and farther down the causal chain to refute some of the interpretations (and herein lies the underdetermination of historical reconstruction, as Tucker pointed out) and strengthen the others (where the notion of strengthening may be related to Lewis' similarity metric, a point that needs further analysis). Here Lewis' points of world become relevant again. 

Applying Peirce to Image Interpretation --- Part Two

If we look again at our four categories --- NONE, ALL, UNIQUE and SHARED --- we immediately realize that they are all grappling with a disjunction that is the enumeration of our sources. Recall that we said that Altdorfer is facing the following situation (in the single source case):

Rufus v Arrian v Justin v Schedel v Harlieb v Aventinus

(where v is the usual vel of classical logic, inclusive or): a big disjunction of choices.

Thus, if we see 32k as the number of battle participants on the flag of the Macedonian infantry, we know that it is either Justin or Schedel or Aventinus, but not Rufus, Arrian or Hartlieb.

The problem is that this representation is logically incomplete. What is missing is the precondition that these are in fact all of the possible sources on the Issos battle that Altdorfer could have consulted. So, the more correct logical form would be something akin to (now in sentential representation):

(and  (sourceUsedInCW Altdorfer-Alexanderschlacht-1528 ?X)
  (memberOf ?X (TheSet Rufus Arrian ... Aventinus))
  (not 
     (thereExists ?Y
        (sourceUsedInCW Altdorfer-Alexanderschlacht-1528 ?Y)
        (not (memberOf ?Y (TheSet Rufus Arrian ... Aventinus))))))

Since this construction is so awkward, we usually have syntactic sugar to make this more palatable.

(candidateSourceUsedInCW Altdorfer-Alexanderschlacht-1528 Rufus)

...

(candidateSourceUsedInCW Altdorfer-Alexanderschlacht-1528 Aventinus)

And then some meta-predicate that makes the same point

(completeExtentAsserted candidateSourceUsedInCW)

... most likely in a suitably restricted microtheory context.

While this is inferential successful and will allow us to conclude NONE in the case of the 12k killed Persian foot, or UNIQUE in the case Oxarthes and the Frauenzimmer, it is also historically false. We have in fact no way to know that there are no other historical sources that were available to Altdorfer at that time. In fact, any day a chance find in the Regensburg library, comparable to the one that recently uncovered the Quintus Rufus edition that Aventinus apparently used (cf Wagner-Jehle, Albrecht Altdorfer: Kunst als Zweite Natur, in: Regensburger Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, Bd 17, Regensburg 2012), might reveal another source.

This could directly affect our UNIQUE or NONE queries, or turn an ALL into a SHARED. It might also upend our source dependency analysis in the case of a former SHARED query. 

This is where truth maintenance comes into play. We must at all times be prepared to take this enumerated set extents and re-validate them against the latest state if historical research, and modify our claims accordingly. The specific transformations are as follows (if there is any change, rather than no change):

• NONE into UNIQUE if the new source contains the feature
• UNIQUE into SHARED if the new source contains the feature
• ALL into SHARED if the new source does not contain the feature

Only SHARED would continue as SHARED, albeit potentially influencing the dependency graph. For example, in a situation before Cord Meckseper's Iconography Paper, discussed in Part One, where only Justin's Epitome and Aventinus' Bavarian Chronicle might be in consideration as source for the 32k Macedonian foot, one might be tempted to think that Aventinus used Justin; but the insertion of Schedel's World Chronicle makes opens up new possibilities here.

Applying Peirce to Image Interpretation --- Part One

The basic notion of Charles Sanders Peirce's, that the positing of an abduced structure of some sort (e.g. a Schankian script in a Davidsonian representation world) can organize a set of disparate pieces into an explanation, is sound. The problem is how to play that through for the specific case of, say, Albrecht Altdorfer's Alexanderschlacht.

The start of the story must be the flags and the labels, because they give specifics. We also need to hold the inscription aside, because there is a strong suspicion that it is not by Altdorfer himself, but later (possibly by Jean De Pay in 1658, whose restauration receipt is already mentioned by Franz von Reber's Catalogue of the Old Pinakothek's collection of 1900 in the 8th edition, though Buchner in the 1938 Katalog for the 400th anniversary exhibition in Munich seems first to suggest that this included a reworking of that inscription).

There is a list of possible sources that Altdorfer could have used for obtaining the details of the battle. That list includes Arrianus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Justin's Epitome of Trogus, Aventinus, the Alexander Romance of Johannes Hartlieb, Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle, and Plutarch. (For some of Aventinus' views on this matter, see this post here.)

Per CSP's recommendation, we can now construct alternate worlds of various forms. The basic idea would be that Altdorfer used exactly one source. For example, as Cord Meckseper did in his article on the iconography of the battle (Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, XXIII, 3/4, 1968, 178-185), one might assume that Schedel's Weltchronik might suffice.

The point is to expand what »suffice« might mean in terms of a strategy of mechanical interpretation. We assume that the narrative (it is not very long in Schedel) is summarized in a suitable Davidsonian event representation. This instantiation then identifies actors, actions, matériel and similar.
We also need a similar instantiation of the content of the painting itself, as an event, describing the various discernibles. Here, we can simplify the problem by delineating (e.g. with TEI standard bounding boxes) and describing at the action level (moving, turning, etc.) all those entities that any of the art historic works we have considered have identified, i.e. the superset of the interpretation constituents. Recall that we wish to model the argumentation, not automate the argumentation.

But if we have the description of the picture, and the description of the events as reported in the various sources, what then is the abduction doing for us? It is the mapping between these components, a representational correspondence. The picture has a golden-armored man riding a white horse. The story has Alexander leading a charge (say, not all sources go into that detail). The abduced mapping then says that the man on the white horse is Alexander (and by one step of inference that leads us beyond the sources, the horse is Bukephalos).

Consider the battle flag for a moment, which consist of the following pieces of information:

• the army to which the troops are attached (Greek/Macedonian or Persian, often mentioned pars pro toto via the commanders Alexander and Darius III)
• the type of troops we are talking about (here, mostly foot vs horse, i.e. infantry vs cavalry)
• the number of men present at the beginning
• the cardinalities of the categories at the end of the battle
• killed (presumably this includes missing in action, in modern parlance)
• captured (e.g. 40k Persians in Justin and Schedel)
• escaped (1k horse w/ Darius in Quintus Curtius Rufus, 4k in Arrian)

Here we are matching not against actors or roles in the script, we are matching against event statistics, so to speak, or statistics of sub-events (e.g. the troop numbers at the beginning and at the end of the battle). The flags visually represent the battle statistics (which are abstractions and therefore not visible per se).

In all of these representational mappings, we can run into four situations:

• NONE: there is something in the image that is in none of the sources (the scythes on the fleeing chariot, the chariot driver felled by the arrow, the boats on the sea), 
• ALL: there is something in the image that is in all of the sources (Alexander, Darius)
• UNIQUE: there is something in the image that is only one of the sources (the women, Oxarthes)
• SHARED: there is something that is in some, but not all of sources (the 32,000 Macedonian foot in Aventinus, Justin's Epitome of Trogus and Schedel's Weltchronik)

We have different reactions to these situations, then, as they give us different information about the question of which sources were used.

• NONE means that Altdorfer invented the matter himself
• ALL means that we cannot distinguish between the different source theories based on this piece of information
• UNIQUE means that the specific source was definitely used

SHARED has a special status, as it is often an indication of the genealogy of the sources themselves. For example, Altdorfer was not the only one working from sources, both Aventinus and Schedel had to use ancient reports to underpin their reconstructions. We may not be able to separate out Justin from Trogus, since Trogus did not survive the ravages of time as an independent source. But since Justin  (200-400 AD) is temporally before Schedel (1493) and Aventinus (1526), it is likely that Schedel used Justin (in the particular case of the 32k Macedonian foot). There are other cases were Schedel agrees with Justin, such as the number of 40k captured Persians.

The problem is trickier in the case of Aventinus, whose Bavarian Chronicle was published in 1526 when Aventinus was already living in Regensburg. Since Schedel predates Aventinus by over 30 years, and Aventinus only discusses Quintus Curtius Rufus as well as Arrian (Bk I, Cpt 153, p.337), as well as disparaging Hartliebs Romance. So perhaps Aventinus used Schedel and not Justin; unfortunately he mentions neither.

One more point about the NONE category, because Alexander's horse Bukephalos falls into it. None of the source I have looked at specifically mention that Alexander was riding Bukephalos at the battle of Issos. But Bukephalos is not invented in the same way that the chariot driver pierced by the arrow is, and not in the same way that the scythes on the carriage are. So we will have to return to the problem of this category at a later point.

But before that, we have to look at the problem of dealing with the open-ended disjunctions.

Reading with Context in Mind: Plough, Sword and Book (Part 1)

The following discussion analyses a few pages of material from Ernest Gellner's Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History, London (Collins Harville) 1988. The idea behind the exercise is to distill out in exemplary fashion the contextual form of book contents that makes some of the strategies of statistical or pattern-based NLP less helpful than one might hope.

In addressing the problem of the role that primitive man plays in modern political thought (the chapter is entitled, "Which way will the Stone Age Vote swing?"), Gellner analyzes the way in which some philosophers talk about previous social states and their impact on morality.

In between the two extremes---candid fictional reconstructionists and paid-up professional anthropologists---there are other who, while not professional specialists in the area of early man, nevertheless intend their affirmation about him [i.e. early man] to be realistic, not mere fictions, but who wish them, all the same, to point a moral for the conduct of our own social life. (p.26)

The fact that this is Gellner's analysis means that this paragraph is his own, and he owns the words in it and the thoughts as well. Thus, if Gellner, to concoct an example, were to deny ever using the word "realistic", one would be justified in pointing to this paragraph and contradicting that assertion.

For instance, one of the profoundest and most influential of prophets of modern economic and other liberalism is F. A. Hayek. Hayek's analysis of the options and perils of modern society do in fact dovetail with a sharply delineated vision of the primitive social order and ethos. On his view, the strong social morality of early man and its survival in contemporary society constitute a positive danger to us: (p.26)

This paragraph is a potential mixture; it starts out as something that Gellner says about Hayek, but toward the end it becomes possible that Gellner uses diction that is more properly considered Hayek's than Gellner's. This is because Gellner is trying to reconstruct Hayek's thought, and when people do that, they often use the words that the author to be reconstructed employs. For example, if the expression "positive danger" strikes readers as interesting, this paragraph would be ill-suited to determine if Hayek or Gellner would use that expression.

Gellner then quotes Hayek, using a block-quote with reduced font-size to indicate that this is so (p.26):

There is ... so far as present society is concerned, no "natural goodness", because with his innate instincts man could never have built up the civilisation on which the numbers of present mankind depend for their lives. To be able to do so, he had to shed many sentiments that were good for the small band, and to submit to the sacrifices which the discipline of freedom demands but which he hates. The abstract society rests on learnt rules and not on pursuing perceived desirable common objects; and wanting to do good to known people will not achieve the most for the community, but only the observation of its abstract and seemingly purposeless rules.^(Fn6) (p.26)

Notice that this paragraph needs to be attributed to Hayek---as footnote 6 tells us, here indicated by ^(Fn6), the passage is from page 20 of Hayek's work The Three Sources of Human Values, published by the London School of Economics and Political Science in London in 1978. Thus, Hayek is the one who talks about submitting to sacrifices, and the discipline of freedom, not Gellner. (Gellner may of course share that view, but we have so far not seen any textual material to support such a supposition.)

Gellner then prepares to quote another passage from Hayek, which he relates to the first passage via an editorial comment on the stance that Hayek has taken.

And, should anyone not understand what this implies in practice, let it be spelt out: (p.26)

So even though Gellner is pointing out a relationship in Hayek's thought, Gellner is at least to some extent using his own words to express that relationship and thereby give an interpretive bias to the reading of the Hayek passage.

The following quote is again distinguished by a smaller font and a blockquote presentation, marking it as a direct quote from a writing by Hayek (minus the editorial [The] that Gellner felt should be inserted).

... the long submerged innate instincts have again surged to the top. [The] demand for a just distribution in which organised power is to be used to allocate to each what he deserves is thus strictly an atavism, based on primordial emotions. And it is these || widely prevalent feelings to which prophets, moral philosophers and constructivists appeal by their plans for the deliberate creation of a new type of society.^(Fn7) (pp.26f)

The passage is from the same work, as we learn from Fn 7, but two pages earlier, p.18. Notice that this casts an odd light on Gellner's transitional phrasing, because having the implication of a thesis precede the thesis is an odd way to present an argument, and cannot really be called a spelling-out, given that most people read from the low to high page numbers.

Gellner now tries to give Hayek a strong interpretation, one that makes plausible why someone would agree to Hayek's claims. That means, we should expect to encounter Hayek's thinking presented in Gellner's words with Hayek's phrases sprinkled throughout.

The picture is striking and suggestive. Men must have lived in something like "bands", groups too small to be capable of imposing abstract and impersonal rules, for a long time---during the overwhelming majority of generations since the inception of humanity, however that inception may be dated. So, on this view, throughout most of our history our situation instilled in us an ethic which is directly opposed to all that is innovative, creative, progressive in human civilization. Hence, civilization is based on the overcoming, not so much of our lowest instincts, but on the contrary of all that had usually been held to be moral: the social impulses of mankind, the tendency to cooperate with fellows in the pursuit of shared aims. Respect for abstract and incomprehensible rules must replace love of fellow men and community and a sense of shared purpose, if civilization is to emerge and survive. (p.27)

We can see immediately that this is a paraphrase of Hayek's thinking; so far, Hayek has only spoken of  "abstract and seemingly purposeless rules", which under Gellner's reconstruction morph into "abstract and impersonal rules" or "abstract and incomprehensible rules", neither of which is far away from Hayek's meaning, but clearly not synonymous with it either.

After all, rules that are seemingly without purpose may still be personal and comprehensible---for example, the rule that after each 1000-point drop in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 have to apologize on public TV and do 20 push-ups. That rule is both personal and comprehensible, just not very conducive to any purpose that we associate with economics.

It remains possible that Gellner was citing phrases from other sections of the Hayek paper that he did not quote directly; we lack the information to determine this. But we can already see that the complex interplay of commentary ("The picture is striking and suggestive"), expansion of ideas (the speculation on the small groups, with the word `bands`, a term that Hayek uses without quotation marks, now in double-quotes) and summaries of arguments ("the tendency to cooperate with fellows in the pursuit of shared aims") makes it very difficult to attribute phrases and ideas to either Hayek or Gellner directly. At the same time, I cannot shake the feeling that, if someone cited the sentence

Respect for abstract and incomprehensible rules must replace love of fellow men and community and a sense of shared purpose, if civilization is to emerge and survive. (p.27)

as Gellner's point of view, Gellner would probably protest, calling such use a case of being quoted out of context, and seeing himself as primarily elucidating Hayek---even if Hayek should object to the rules being labeled "incomprehensible".

It is important to note that Gellner strengthening Hayek's stance by paraphrasing and working to give it additional plausibility is not a fault at all, but one of Gellner's qualities as a good writer, as someone who tries to compact Hayek's writing for an audience unfamiliar with Hayek's views and takes the arguments of Hayek seriously.

Not very surprising, Gellner continues to unfold Hayek's thought, formally repeating the methods of the previous paragraph, elucidating and bringing in new notions from Hayek's extensive oeuvre.

In Hayek's vision, an unplanned, unintended culture, which was the fruit neither of conscious reason nor of animal instinct, had somehow arisen, and it alone made possible that automatic mechanism of response to need, that sustained innovative improvement, which is manifested in and fostered by the market. ... || ... Seeing how recent precarious our liberation from over-socialization is, it is surprising that we are not even more thoroughly in thrall to atavistic sociability than Hayek fears. It is a social ethic and cohesiveness, not their absence, which are our greatest threat. (pp.27f)

Even though Gellner explicitly labels the exposition as Hayek's (his "vision"), he is now bringing in terms that are not licensed by the quotes and that presumably come from the other parts of Hayek's oeuvre, key among which the notion of the market, or the notion of natural selection. (Gellner errs in not providing footnotes for the source of these concepts in Hayek's writing, but increasingly, footnotes have come to be viewed as pedantic and no longer in need of precision.)

At the same time, the paraphrasing with its subtle shifts of meaning continues; Hayek in the quotes at least never spoke of "animal instinct", but called them "innate instincts". For example, with Steven Pinker we could claim that language belongs to the innate instincts, but clearly is not a good example of an animal instinct, give how few (or none, if one follows Pinker) animals share our form of language.

Since the point of the exercise is not to understand either Hayek or Gellner's argument, just how the thoughts and the linguistic presentations of these thoughts co-occur in a specific text, we will not delve into the elided middle section of that paragraph of Gellner's (see the ellipsis in the quotation from pp.27f above) and continue straight to the next paragraph of Gellner's exposition, on page 28.

Hayek's way of presenting our general condition differs from what might be called the simplest or classical formulation of laissez faire liberalism, in his conscious stress on the cultural preconditions of an open or market society. The classical formulation suggests that its only important condition is a political one: a just, effective and unrapacious state must be present, a political authority which uses its power to keep the peace and uphold the rules, and does not use it simply to despoil civil society. Hayek's new way of defining the problem makes him insist that mere political order is not enough, that a certain kind of abstract culture is also required, the emergence of a sense of and respect for abstract rules, and a detachment from communal, cooperative ends. The Hidden Hand can operate only in a suitable cultural milieu, amongst men who are not too sociable, men who respect rules rather than social aims. (p.28)

At this point, Gellner is contrasting two stances simultaneously, what he calls the classical formulation of liberalism and Hayek's form. These two stances are distinguished, according to Gellner, in their emphasis, the one putting the accent on the political and the other on the cultural preconditions.  Because the paragraph has the potential for losing even the interested reader, Gellner has begun to use emphasis (italics) in the typography to distinguish the key terms that identify the stances. Such an emphasis would have been even more effective if he had not been forced, by convention, to also italicize the French (i.e. non-English) phrase "laissez faire" in the same paragraph.

We observe that Gellner's use of italics for emphasis is in general ambiguous to its precise meaning; on p.27, he used it to mark the introduction of important economic term of the market. That market's regulatory force, the Hidden Hand, however, receives no such emphasis and is capitalized as an agentive force instead.

Our little excursion is almost completed at this point, as we turn to the last paragraph in Gellner's consideration of early man. Gellner turns to the social theory of Hayek's one-time colleague at the London School of Economics and former compatriot, Karl Popper.

A very similar sense of the struggle, not with destructive animal instincts, but on the contrary with an oppressively social morality and the deep feelings which underline it, is also found in the social thought of Karl Popper.^(Fn8) This Hayek/Popper vision might well be called the Viennese Theory. One may well wonder whether it was not inspired by the fact that, in the nineteenth century, the individualistic, atomized, cultivated bourgeoisie of the Habsburg capital had to contend with the influx of swarms of kin-bound, collectivistic, rule-ignoring migrants from the easter marches of the Empire, from the Balkans and Galicia. Cosmopolitan liberals had to contend, in the political sphere, with the emerging breed of national socialists. This "Viennese" vision is an inversion, a denial all at once of romanticism -- it elevates || Gesellschaft (society) over Gemeinschaft (community) --- and of Marxism. Marx anticipated the restoration, rather than the overcoming, of the alleged social proclivities of early man. (pp.28f)

The literature referenced for Karl Popper in Footnote 8 is his classic The Open Society and Its Enemies, London 1945. We observe that we again encounter the use of italics to highlight terms, e,g, national socialists such as the Austro-Fascists as compared to economic socialists in the sense of the followers of Karl Marx, as well as non-English terminology, such as the German words Gesellschaft or Gemeinschaft.

In this paragraph, the reader has to pay careful attention to attribute stances properly. Not only is Gellner discussing Popper, but he is aligning Popper with Hayek and even combining them into a single theory or "vision" (cf the Viennese Theory versus the "Viennese" vision).  At the same moment, for the first time in the selection that we have been analyzing, Gellner actually engages in historiography (we will get to this problem soon), so he is reporting background information to justify his postulate of a Viennese Theory. Thus, because he is not describing the stance of the theory, but its genesis, Gellner owns this paragraph and its terminology.

To summarize: In roughly three pages, Gellner has given us an exposition of at least two intellectual stances that he may or may not share, namely those of F.A. Hayek and of the classical formulation of laissez-faire liberalism; Popper really received one sentence only and was not given a single quote. Gellner has presented these positions in quotes, which are typographically distinct, and in paraphrases, some of which make inexact use of the terminology found in the reconstructed texts. Gellner has interleaved these reconstructions which his comments and in the case of the Vienna Theory, even with an origins story that draws additional background information into the text. Notice that the brevity of the sample did not allow some other occurrences one should expect in a book the size of Gellner's, such as direct quotes of other writers' interpretations of Hayek or Popper, or paraphrases of others' reconstructions of the texts under consideration.

It is perhaps not surprising then that the typical techniques of corpus linguistics cannot succeed readily in such a setting; even though there is a sense in which Gellner's book is a corpus of conceptual stances. Perhaps the reading is not distant enough.

The problem of the range of the Discourse

During a discussion of couples' interactions in the New Yorker, the author reminded the reader that the range of a discourse in presidential politics and the presidential White House extends to the previous occupants and their actions as well.

On Tuesday, after Melania [Trump] appeared again to reject the President [Donald Trump], this time on the tarmac in Rome with a slick “down low, too slow” move, Pete Souza, President Obama’s official photographer, posted a photo to his Instagram account of Barack and Michelle tenderly holding hands in Selma, Alabama, a gesture that needed no interpretation.

This is an example of the kind of interaction that is difficult to track or detect without establishing the precise discourse that the item belongs to. Here models of layers of discourse that need to be attended to are crucial.

Eventually, the Washington Post made it clear at a description level, by linking to these (and other) clips and photos, providing the interpretation for those that had missed the discourse contributions. So the hope of large scale ingesting of documents for interpretation is that discourse contributions that are clever in the way that Souza's was will eventually have the kind schoolmaster who spells out what the others suspected. (In some sense, the historians often end up in that role.)

Of course, not every hand-holding couple posted that day is a commentary on the Trumps' situation, but most likely, the George W. Bushes' holding hands would have been, within a specific window of time, of course.

Appendix

Portelli on the Difference of Oral History

Alessandro Portelli insists that as oral sources, the recorded tape is the actual document (p.33), which can therefore not be destroyed.

The transcription, as a written document the preferred form, is a removed object due to its various forms of interpretation, such as the punctuation which ties to replicate pauses in speech. (p.34)

The tone and volume range and the rhythm of popular speech carry implicit meaning and social connotations which are not reproducible in writing --- unless, and then in inadequate and hardly accessible form, as musical notation. (p.34)

It has no story for some speech properties, such as the velocity of speech, an ambiguous but meaningful property (p.34).

... slowing down may mean greater emphasis as well as greater difficulty, and acceleration may show a wish to glide over certain points, as well as a greater familiarity or ease. (p.34)

Because these properties are "sites" of important narrative functions, their loss reduces the emotional valence of the narrative. (p.35)

This is even more true when folk informants are involved: they may be poor in vocabulary but are often richer in range of tone, volume and intonation than middle-class speakers who have learned to imitate in speech the monotone of writing. (p.35)

Because oral history produces a narrative, the tools for analysis of narratives are relevant. (p.35) Such formal and stylistic analyses are not optional:

The greater or lesser presence of formalized materials (proverbs, songs, formulas, and stereotypes) may measure the degree in which a collective viewpoint exists within an individual's narrative. (p.35)

This equally applies to standardized language and dialect and their uses (p.35).

Oral history is concerned with meaning more than with facts (p.36); thus the factually `false` may still be psychologically `true` (p.37). Thus, in terms of the Russian formalists, it contributes less to the fabula than to the plot [we would say emplotment now, RCK] (p.36).

Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did. (p.36)

Portelli stresses that many written sources are fundamentally transcripts of uncontrolled oral sources, which can thereby never be analyzed for bias (p.37).

 ... memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings. (p.37)

Because of this meaning, there are systematic distortions, which are almost as informative as the facts to be recalled. As standards of acceptability of behavior change, editing and even hiding takes place, which is crucial information (p.38).

The difference between how the subject used to think and how the subject thinks now is a key contribution in understanding the change that has occurred (p.38). Those who cannot separate this shift out use an epic mode of presentation, because they claim a timeless relevance of the past for the present. The ability to escape this timewarp is a key skill the interviewer can contribute.

If the interview is conducted skillfully and its purposes are clear to the narrators, it is not impossible for them to make a distinction between present and past self, and to objectify the past self as other than the present one. In these cases --- Malcolm X is again typical --- irony is the major narrative mode: two different ethical (or political, or religious) and narrative standards interfere and overlap, and their tension shapes the telling of the story. (p.38) [emphasis in original, RCK]

[[RCK: Notice that this is the technical use of irony, not the standard common-sense on.]]

Portelli stresses that oral sources remain artificial, variable and partial. (p,38) This has to do with the fact that the interview situations is engineered; the oral replies given are not repeatable; and the knowledge of the informer can never be exhausted (pp.39-40).

The relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee cannot be overrated, because the interviewer is what makes the potential of an oral source into an actuality and causes "transmission" to take place (p.39). As a consequence, an oral source that is transcribed without the questions of the interviewer eliminates half of the interaction and obfuscates the variability, insinuating that the interviewee would have responded equally every time (p.39).

Researchers often introduce specific distortions: informants tell them what they believe they want to be told and thus reveal who they think the research is. (p.39)

Rigidly over-structuring the interview will only turn the interviewee into an echo of the views of the interviewer, merely confirming the frame of reference of the historian (p.39). Portelli calls that phenomenon "ventriloquizing" (p.40).

Variability needs to be addressed by re-questioning, but the fact that this cannot quiesce produces the partial nature of the oral source (pp.39f).

The oral source is the combined product of the historian and the interviewee, not the unfiltered voice of the silenced masses.

... the control of the historical discourse remains firmly in the hand of the historian. (p.40)

Even accepting that the working class speaks through oral history, it is clear that the class does not speak in the abstract, but speaks to the historian, with the historian and, inasmuch as the material is published, through the historian. (p.40)

[[RCK: To which I would add that the class does not speak either, but members of the class, but the intent is clear of course.]]

Finally, as a literary researcher, Portelli rightfully points out that, other than in the case of other sources, historians are an embedded narrator of the story, in the style of the modern novel, not the 19th century omniscient narrator using the third person voice (p.41). Portelli analogizes the situation to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, who has to ask other 'informants' in order to complement what he has heard and seen.

In the writing of history, as in literature, the act of focusing on the function of the narrator causes this function to be fragmented. (p.41)

On explicitly entering the story, historians must allow the sources to enter the tale with their autonomous discourse. (p.41)

Oral history has no unified subject; it is told from a multitude of points of view, .... oral history can never be told without taking sides, since the 'sides' exist inside the telling. And ... historians and 'sources' are hardly ever on the same 'side'. (p.41)  

Bibliographic Record

Alessandro Portelli, What Makes Oral History Different, in: Robert Perks, Alistair Thomson (ed), The Oral History Reader, 2nd Edition, London (Routledge) 2006, pp.32-41.

Religious Community Founding at Kirtland

There is a complex of revelations that together form the founding charter of the religious community that Joseph Smith Jr was setting up the Mormons and Campbellites in Kirtland to be.

The precondition had been D&C 38 (JS Papers version) given at the Fayette Church conference in New York, January 2nd, 1831, just before the departure (which had been established in D&C 37 (JS Papers version) as a response to the harassment of the Church in NY).

D&C 38 established (v18) that the Church members had been promised a land of "milk and honey" as part of the new covenant with God, which they would keep in eternity (v20). There they could segregate themselves from the wicked and their enemies (v31; v42) and live under God's law and be endowed from up high (v32). The revelation also announced that there would be several men (vv34-36) to take care of the poor and the needy, selected from among the Church members by the Church members--a foreshadowing of the role of the Bishop).

D&C 41 (JSP version) of February 4th, 1831 and D&C 42 (JSP Version Part 1, vv1-72, and Part 2, vv73-93) of February 9th and 23rd, 1831, respectively, together form the founding document of the religious community.

D&C 41 begins by recapping the expected revelation of a law for the religious community. It then provides for a home "to live and translate" in for the prophet (who had been working on an improved Bible translation, cf. D&C 37, v1), and a room for Sidney Rigdon (later amended to "should live as seemeth him good"). The remainder summarily calls Edward Partridge to the role of a bishop, leaving behind his "merchandise", without specifying any details concerning the task of bishop, "see to all things as it shall be appointed in my Laws in the day that I shall give them".

D&C 42 (in its two parts) establishes the community rules. In the earliest extant copy, the revelation is headed with "The Laws of the Church of Christ[,] Kirtland[,] Geauga [County,] Ohio".

The first part, after an opening (vv1-3), gives the call for the elders to go in pairs and preach the imminent Kingdom of God (vv4-9), with restrictions for Joseph Smith Jr and Sidney Rigdon (who are busy with the fullness of the Gospel, cf. v15), until Zion is revealed (at which point it is either too late to join or there is no point in building up congregations at other locales) (v9).

The exposition continues with the criteria of authorization to teach within the community (vv11-17). [(v10) which re-iterates the call to service of Edward Partridge as bishop, would have been castigated as an insertion by a later scribe in every other hermeneutic context, and the scribe called a dolt for missing the fact that the Laws of the Church of Christ as general rules of guidance are somewhat at odds with a particular temporary appointment. The closing formula of "Amen" would suggest that it had been a self-contained pronouncement previously.]

Next comes the exposition of the church rules in a more constrained sense (vv.18-29). [The emphatic "I speak to the Church" in (v18) is somewhat clumsy.] While the contents is very similar to the Ten Commandments,  the focus is on the possibility of obtaining forgiveness for the transgression---a key issue in an apocalyptic and millennial context, as the consequence is to be removed from the elect and thus to be counted among the lost. Furthermore, all the issues raised are inter-personal issues, and thus affect community cohesion.

Next comes the law of consecration proper (vv.30-39), with its notion of stewardship and the role of the Bishop's storehouse and the accumulation of residues. The exposition covers the logistics of the exchange (vv.30-32), the purposes of the storehouse contents (vv.33-36), and the how to handle the exit condition in the case of a casting out (vv.37-38). (v.39) is intriguing, as it suggests that the WASP Americans will even out the socio-economic status of the Indians.

The next section (vv.40-42) covers everyday behavior within the community, exhorting them to work and morally good exterior. Then (vv.43-52) the process for dealing with sickness in the community is outlined, and the success of the charismatic healing is tied to the faith of the individual (but not of the elders). The outcome of death in the case of laying on of hands is explained (vv.44-47), and the point raised that dying without a hope of resurrection is the worst (v.45).

The following sction (vv.53-55) returns to the problem of stewardship and represents a rejection of specific forms of communitarianism, by insisting on private property and intra-community trade (v.54) and directed all surplus again to the storehouse [of the Bishop] (v.55).

The next section (vv.56-69) talk about the role of scripture in guiding the behavior of the community members, and how the knowledge of Zion will be given, and mysteries that will be revealed to those that obey the commandments. [Confusingly, after earlier demanding that the missionaries go westward (v.8) and build up churches in all the regions there, the missionaries are now told to go eastward and get the converts to move West, to escape the secret combinations (v.64). For the future, missionizing in all cardinal directions is prophesied (v.63).]

The next section (vv.70-73) returns to the problem of remuneration of people from the storehouse, having the bishop and the counselors and the elders and the high priests either supported thence or provided with just remuneration.

The second part, originally revealed two weeks later, begins with adultery one more time (vv.74-83), before going into a distinction between the law of the Land and the law of God and how different deeds lead the miscreant to be turned over to one law or the other (vv.84-93). Thus stealing, lying and robbing are to be dealt with by handing over to the Law of the Land. These then are the rules of the religious community for expelling members into the broader social context without treating the expulsion as exculpation. But community internal things are to be regulated in the minimal context possible, even to the point of preserving secrecy (v.92).

19th Century Bible Commentaries

In an attempt to get an idea of how Joseph Smith Jr would have read the Bible, I started looking at Bible commentaries available online that either Joseph Smith Jr or the preachers that he encountered might have read. I choose 1827 as my somewhat arbitrary cut-off date, since that is the beginning of the Book of Mormon translation effort; Joseph Smith Jr received the plates in September of that year.

Whole Bible Commentaries

• Joseph Benson, an early Methodist minister and friend of John Wesley, wrote a Commentary on the OT & NT
• Adam Clarke (1760?-1832), a British Methodist theologian and supporter of Wesley, wrote a six-volume commentary.
• Thomas Coke (9 September 1747 - 2 May 1814) was the first Methodist Bishop and is known as the Father of Methodist Missions. He wrote a six-volume commentary (1801-1803).
• John Gill (November 23, 1697-October 14, 1771) was an English Baptist, a biblical scholar, and a staunch Calvinist. Between 1746 and 1763, he wrote An Exposition of the New Testament (3 vols., 1746-8), and an Exposition of the Old Testament (6 vols., 1748-63).
• Robert Hawker (1753-1827) was a Devonian vicar of the Anglican Church and the most prominent of the vicars of Charles Church, Plymouth, Devon. His grandson was Cornish poet Robert Stephen Hawker. He wrote a book of Biblical notes called Hawker's Poor Man's Commentary.
• George Leo Haydock (1774-1849), scion of an ancient English Catholic Recusant family, was a priest, pastor and Bible scholar. His edition of the Douay Bible with extended commentary, originally published in 1811, became the most popular English Catholic Bible of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic.
• Matthew Henry (18 Oct 1662 - 22 June 1714) was an English Presbyterian minister who wrote a renowned commentary on the whole Bible, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (1708-10, known also as Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible), which went up to Acts and was completed by like-minded authors after his death in 1714. A more compact version, Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary on the Bible was published in 1706 already.
• Matthew Poole (1624 - 1679) was an English Nonconformist theologian. His English annotations on the Bible were republished until 1840.
• Charles Simeon (24 September 1759 – 13 November 1836), was an English evangelical clergyman, and founder of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (now known as the Church's Ministry Among Jewish People or CMJ) in 1809. His major opus the Horae Homileticae was published in London starting in 1819, with many editions and reprints.
• John Trapp, (5 June 1601, Croome D'Abitot - 16 October 1669, Weston-on-Avon), was an English Anglican Bible commentator. His large five-volume commentary is still read today and is known for its pithy statements and quotable prose.
• John Wesley was a Church of England cleric and an Arminian theologian. Wesley is largely credited, along with his brother Charles Wesley, as founding the Methodist movement which began when he took to open-air preaching in a similar manner to George Whitefield. His Notes on the New Testament (1755) are enlightening.

New Testament

• Johann Albrecht Bengel (24 June 1687 – 2 November 1752) was a Lutheran pietist clergyman and Greek-language scholar known for his edition of the Greek New Testament. The other great work of Bengel, and that on which his reputation as an exegete is mainly based, is his Gnomon Novi Testamenti, or Exegetical Annotations on the New Testament, published in 1742.
• William Burkitt (25 July 1650 in Hitcham, Suffolk, England - 24 October 1703, Essex) was a biblical expositor and vicar in Dedham, Essex, England. Burkitt is known for his Bible commentary, Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament (Gospels published 1700, Acts to Revelation published 1703).

Contemporaries of Joseph Smith Jr

• Albert Barnes (1789-1870), from Rome, New York, graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1823, but did not begin publishing his Notes until the 1830s, AFAIK.
• Joseph Sutcliffe (+ 1854) wrote his commentary after retiring as a Wesleyan circuit preacher at age 74 in London; it was published around 1836.

Notes on Reimarus

There are two structural weaknesses with the ideas of Reimarus that jump out on a first pass of the book.

1. The notion of the resurrection and the parousia are not interestingly different from the miracles, in that they belong to the conceptual space of Judaism, esp. the Pharisees, of that time. They are worth separating since their time horizon is much longer, and they are singletons in terms of the event structure---other than the miracles, which can occur multiple times. It is true that their foundational role segregates them, but they share the problem that they prove nothing, in Reimarus' natural theology notion, and confirm nothing, due to their semantic ambiguity.
2. The idea of the Priesterbetrug, which is essentially what Reimarus is accusing the Apostles of, flies in his own argument by virtue of a socio-economic class distinction. But that is problematic for two reasons, because the Pharisees, as the NT shows, believe in these things and are the antagonists of Jesus; and the Galilean apostles are if anything even lower on the socio-economic ladder. Thus, socio-economically speaking, people like the apostles either believed in the resurrection, parousia, miracles and prophecies, or they did not. But if they did not, then they would not have been able to make any more converts; and if they did, then it is not clear how they would have come up with the "lie" that Reimarus claims they invented.

In general, it would be good to know more about how the Romans did with their executed prisoners. It strikes me that the idea of Joseph of Amarithea might be dependent on being able to pinpoint a grave that can then be empty; and Paul for example famously knows nothing of the empty grave.

Using the US Census Data for Early Mormonism

It would be nice to make use of the US Census Data for the interpretation of Early Mormonism. But the problems are not without their trickery.

Palmyra belonged to the Phelps and Gorham Purchase and was incorporated in March 29, 1827. While now part of Wayne County, Wayne County itself was only formed April 11th, 1823, when parts of Seneca and Ontario county were combined. Thus, if one wants to study the 1820 census, one has to look at the Ontario county entry, under which Palmyra (unfortunately misspelled as Palnyra in the table) was classified at that time.

Fortunately, the issue does not arise for Sharon, Windsor County, Vermont, where Joseph Smith Jr was born in December 23rd, 1805, as that county had been founded in 1781, and the town was a New Hampshire grant of King George III, and established by settlers from Sharon, Connecticut.

The Book of Mormon an ancient book?

In our ongoing analysis of Mormon apologetics, I will today discuss an article published in Noel B. Reynolds and Charles D. Tate (ed), Book of Mormon authorship : new light on ancient origins, (Volume 7 of the Religious Studies monograph series), Provo, 1982, namely C. Wilfred Griggs effort The Book of Mormon as an Ancient Book, pp.75-102.

Griggs starts his exposition with an analogy (p.77) between how ancient documents are analyzed and how the Book of Mormon should be analyzed (by anyone other than Hugh Nibley). The exemplar is Morton Smith of Columbia's discovery in 1958 of a letter by Clement of Alexandria to an unknown Theodore, discovered in Jerusalem (pp.77-78)---the so-called Mar Saba letter.

Griggs observes that Smith took 450 pages to argue for the antiquity of the 2-and-a-half page letter, and demands similar diligence for the Book of Mormon (p.78).

However, this tack completely bypasses the fact that the Mar Saba letter would have been rejected out of hand had it styled itself as prophecy of future events, in the way that the prediction of the Reformation figures in the Book of Mormon. Modern biblical research is not amenable to prophecy and fulfillment narratives. Thus, it is no wonder that the research into the Book of Mormon as an ancient book is as shallow as it has been outside of BYU, given that the contents violates the most basic tenants of biblical scholarship with respect to prophecy and revelation. Put differently, there is no point in tackling the issue of historical compatibility (p.79) if the contents exposes the narrative as non-historic.

Thus remains the question of what it benefits the BoM to enumerate Orphic and similar parallels to the golden plates and the tree of life (pp.79-102).

A similar tack is taken by Hugh Nibley himself, in his contribution, Two Shots in the Dark, pp.103-142, who goes straight for the Lachish letters from 1935 to authenticate the Book of Mormon. The argument is awash in Nibley's famous erudition and command of the material, but some of the specifics raise questions.

• When Nibley writes: "The discovery of the Elephantine documents in 1925 showed that colonies of Jews actually did flee into the desert in the manner of Lehi, during his lifetime, and for the same reasons; ...." (p.108), this is really puzzling, because the papyri of Elephantine belong into a latter period (end of the 6th and beginning of the 5th), not into the time of Jeremiah. And the papyri I have seen are far too sparse to determine why the mercenaries went there.
• When Nibley writes: "The action of the Lachish Letters centers around the activities of the prophets in the land, who are causing grave concern to the government." (p.110) this is an exaggeration, since the word "prophet" occurs in the ANECT translation exactly once, and in the subordinate role of a messenger; the second mention in Letter VI in this translation is interpolated (and rendered as "princes" in ANECT). 
• Inexplicably, Nibley uses the 4 Esra and 2 Baruch apocalypse, clearly from the first century AD at best, to make sense of Lehi's behavior in the 7th century BC at the time of Jeremiah (p.112).
• According to this paper by Winton Thomas from 1945 on the Lachish Letters, the editor Harry Torczyner himself retracted the restoration of the "visionary man" that is so important for Nibley (p.114) as early as 1940. Furthermore, as Thomas points out, the number of destroyed ostraka in the guard house at Lachish is so high that the remaining can hardly form a set of a conversation, the way Torczyner envisioned it.

What is the point then for Nibley to go into all these other amazing "coincidences" regarding the Book of Mormon and the Lachish Letters as reconstructed by Torczyner, if these problems already make all upstream arguments dubious?

Literalism and Relevancy

In a recent discussion with a good friend and supporter of my research, it became obvious to the two of us that the metaphorical and poetic nature of religious revelations was also directly related to its continued relevancy, in that it gave the articulation point to map the insights into the present as the time of revelation receded farther into the past.

That would mean that, potentially, both the diminishing importance of the Book of Mormon and the need for ongoing revelations within the context of the Latter Day Saints movements could be due to the Biblical primitivism and revelatory literalism, which impedes the religious reuse of the revelations, other than would have been the case for metaphoric and poetic readings.

As a result, it might make sense to look back at Maimonides, who took great advantage of the metaphoric and poetic contents of the Old Testament during the rescue of that scripture for the Aristotelian philosophy of the Middle Ages.

The Vengeance of Clio

Clio is a pretty nasty one, she likes to trip up people who project their current interpretations into the past and treat them as an unchanging status.

Case in point: Mormon attitudes on coffee and tea.

Joseph Smith Jr had a revelation in 1833, informally known as the Word of Wisdom, or technically known as D&C 89, which states

(v9) And again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly.

Fair enough as that goes; however that revelation is not very specific. So we need, unsurprisingly, a community of interpretation, that knows that "hot drink" here means coffee and tea, but not hot chocolate, or soup in a mug. We have such a community in the Mormon FAQ site for bodily health, this is specifically interpreted to mean "tea and coffee", as indicated by some of the comments.

For example, Molly writes:

God gave us the ability to choose. There are substances in coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco and other harmful drugs that limit our ability to choose. The intent of the law of health we follow is to preserve our ability to make good choices. ...

Similarly, Ben writes:

Three years after the church was organized (1833), God gave a law of health to Joseph Smith (the first president of the church) that discouraged the use of tobacco, alcohol, coffee and tea. Those who observe this code of healthy eating (called "the word of wisdom") are promised to have better physical and mental abilities, and an improved ability to connect with God. 

Today, the adverse effects of alcohol and tobacco on health are well-known. This was not the case when mormons first began observing the word of wisdom. Whether tea and coffee are bad for one's health is similarly unknown. Like mormons in the 19th century, we observe the word of wisdom as a matter of faith rather than science. 

A few other points:
- the word of wisdom is not just about not eating certain things, it's more about taking care of your body
- some members abstain from caffeine, while others do not---it's an individual decision
- herbal teas are generally considered to be ok

The fact of the matter with herbal teas is interesting, because herbal teas are clearly a "hot drink"; the problem is that the remainder of D&C 89 explicitly talks about the proper use of herbs as medicinals, arguing strongly that herbal tea should be fine.

Which brings us to the remaining issue, that however much strength the current participants of mormon.org draw from this interpretation, this was not as interesting to the wives of Brigham Young back in 1849.

In a letter to Marinda Hyde at Kanesville from April 8th, 1849, Louisa Beaman Young writes (in the expressive spelling of the time):

sister p mentioned in her letter she drank a cup of tea occasionally for me I am quite glad she does for it is verry seldom that I get the chance to drink a cup for myself, tea and, coffee, and shugar is verry scarse with us ... (in: Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, p.66)

Clearly some of this tea was herbal; Louisa Beaman Young made ginger tea for Zina Huntington Young on June 28th, 1849 (Compton, p.68). The tea that Joseph Smith Jr made for the Huntingtons in the early days of Nauvoo, when his adopted daughter Julia was taking care of the family, most likely was herbal as well (Compton, p.78).

But we have evidence from the great exodus to Utah that coffee was part of the trip, as Todd Compton's summary of Zina's personal journal indicates.

Zina [Huntington Jacobs, later Young, RCK] remembers that it was so cold that night [after the birth of Henry Chariton, RCK] that in the morning the cattle's feet had to be chopped out of the frozen mud. Mother Lyman prepared coffee and a biscuit for Zina and the journey continued. (Compton, p.87)