William Heth Whitsitt's Sidney Rigdon MS, (Part 1)

William Heth Whitsitt's Sidney Rigdon MS, (Part 1) a long paper on how Rigdon must be the author of the Book of Mormon, based on the alignment with Disciple theology, by a Southern Baptist theologian.

I ended up not using this in my book.

the possibility of digitally supporting argumentation in the humanities

As noted in my previous post,  while the decision process regarding the quality of arguments in the digital humanities is complicated and usually involves mainly sins of omission, the basic model of an argument being open to confirmation makes for a sensible launching point to bring DH support to bear.

It is important to understand that at the level of generality under discussion here, there is no principal bias toward formal models of argumentation. By this I mean that there is no bias toward argumentation whose rules of inference have already been formalized (such as first-order predicate calculus or decision logic or similar). However, it seems to me that the interest in the ability of others to follow our arguments implies that the rules of inference I use in my argument could at least in principle be formalized. If such a "mechanical" or "symbolic" notion of inference is admitted, then Turing has good news for us: such a process of validation of an argument is a Turing-computable function and we can bring effective digital support to bear on the problem.

On the one hand it seems clear that, within the schools of the various disciplines of the humanities, rules for what are valid and proper forms of argumentation (and what are not) have developed and are taught successfully to the new generation. (This is the direction that Thomas Kuhn's arguments about the paradigms of scientific practice are hinting toward.) On the other hand, most humanities scholars would be hard-pressed to successfully formalize their underlying rules of inference. They may even have difficulties to press the forms of argumentation of their school of thinking correctly into another formalized system of inference---such as first-order predicate logic or decision logic.

The situation appears perhaps even more difficult when faced with heuristics, by which I mean argument constructs that are rule-like but are mutually exclusive and are known to be only valid in some situations. Perhaps best-known in the humanities are the rules for cross-document textual interpretation when reconstructing an Urtext, such as lectio difficilior or lectio brevior.  These heuristics come into conflict if the shorter text eliminated difficulties.

But even if we are admonished not to apply these heuristics mechanically, the fact that their weighing against each other could be taught suggests that they can be explained and in the limit applied mechanically by those wishing to understand the process of our weighing, that is our argument.

digital support for argumentation in the humanities

Perhaps it is especially obvious to someone who has just published his first book that monographs are large complex theoretical undertakings that could benefit from more digital support than word processing, map drawing, or Google and Amazon Kindle books (as searchable sources) provide---however helpful all of these things are!

At the same time, these analogous tools give an appreciation for the limitations of the support one should expect realistically: for example, it took about two weeks of low-level LaTeX tweaking to get my monograph just right, with judicious page stretching and negative-space fiddling and, in the end, we were stuck splicing a page-break into a generated file (the output from the indexer) in order to get the look "just right" (TM by Goldilocks)---a computer-science no-no if there ever was one!

The basic idea behind argumentation in the humanities is simple enough: I would want other people, given the data that I used, and applying to these the analysis that I applied, to come to the same conclusion that I arrived at. In the limit, that process should be effectively mechanical.

The practice of actual scholarly argumentation is of course vastly more complicated, where people often challenge arguments, by

• challenging the data selection, meaning that there is other data that should have been used
• challenge the data use, meaning that other features of the data set should have been used 
• challenging the models (scripts, in the language of Schank and Abelson) that are used to interpret people's actions 
• etc

The implied criticism is always that these differences in strategies would have led to differences in the argument outcomes (everything else would be supporting evidence). This means that an argument that can be followed and agreed to under its premises is only a small part of the scientific process in the humanities. 

While this is true,  it also stands to reason that the infrastructure developed for digitally supporting the construction and maintenance of humanities arguments and narratives are a good launching pad for digitally supporting the comparison of different arguments and narratives in the humanities. 

So, while effort expended in the digital support of humanities argumentation will not solve "the problem", it is an interesting incremental improvement of supporting ever more of the scientific work of the humanities digitally.

Carson and the Pseudo-Archeologists

Presidential candidate Ben Carson made use of his Seventh-Day Adventist convictions to interpret the Pyramids as grain silos, provoking reactions from many archeologists, such as Kristina Killgrove, who pointed out not only various issues with the claim but also to general recent efforts in combating pseudo-archeology in the first place. The most interesting of these are the initiative to review pseudo-archeological work in archeological reviews and the link to a Fall 2015 university course on that problem.

My take-home quote for right now is

In the second review, The Ancient Alien Question, archaeologist Jeb Card points out, as does Feder, that the origins of this idea lay in Victorian mysticism and Theosophy, a movement that “blended hermetic magic, spiritualism, Western curiosity ab[o]ut Eastern religion, colonial racism, and misconceptions of evolution into a worldview of root races, lost continents, and ascended masters who originated on Venus or other worlds.

Models of FW's Conceptualization of Trinity and Christology

There is a set of pairwise terms that Falk Wagner and his modern interpreters have used to discuss the inner-trinitarian and the christological situation with respect to an interpretation of modern religion guided by religious sociology.

FW himself had used

• Transzendenz und Immanenz
• Selbstsein und Anderssein
• Personalität und Sozietät

to capture the structure of Christology. FW can even speak of "personaler Transzendenz und sozialer Immanenz". The point is always to retain the "Selbstzweck" of the individual in the face of the powerful social systems. In this context, FW dispenses with super-natural subjects and functionalizes them for the construction and build-out of the religious consciousness.

His interpreters accept the transcendent and immanent conceptualization, but propose to use instead pairs such as

• Offenbarung und Geschichte
• Glaube und Geschichte
• Selbstverständnis und Selbstbild
• Dogmatik und Historie

to capture the Christological structure. The argument goes that revelation and history replace the dual-nature problem in Christ for the Enlightenment theology, and under the impact of David Friedrich Strauss transform the revelation-aspect into the faith-aspect (Ritschl und Herrmann). 

This follows FW's lead in emphasizing the fact that only the individual's religiosity can be the proper subject of study in modern times. This allows to treat Christology as the theory of the symbolic representation in the self-relationship of the religious consciousness. Though nobody has written so, AFAIK, this meshes well with the Reformation notion of a "simul iustus et peccator", where the self-understanding is iustus while the self-image as historical is peccator. 

The drawback of that strategy is that it truncates the social aspect of the solution FW had sketched. Theology has no longer any contribution to make to the question of the Selbstzweck of the individual, or has to do so using a completely different road.

For the point of departure with FW is that the realization of the self in ignorance of the other is the definition of sin. FW's criticism vis-a-vis Barth is that it cannot be sin if mankind does it but the height of divine majesty if God does it, and that is why the correspondence of self and other in its reflexive logic of acceptance (Anerkennungslogik) has to be placed at the core of the trinitarian description. 

From this point of view, the self-understanding of the religious consciousness is a reduction that leaves quite a bit of the productivity of the FW approach by the wayside.

PS: In this context, FW's critics claim the "Zugangsproblem" that dogmatics and empirical sociology of religion can both only provide the services of "deuten und konstruieren" for the empirical religion as lived. However, the difference that FW seems to be after is the distinction between normative and descriptive, as in linguistics; and to the extent that dogmatic theology is willing to be descriptive only, it has effectively traded places with a sociology of religion that proceeds in an empirical fashion. At least a juxtaposition of the shape "Dogmatik und Historie" does not lend credence to that tack, however.