Hmmmmm ...

[A less presumptuous name.]

What Erasmus is saying is that one can never be absolutely certain in any natural fact. It is theoretically possible that the existence of the now-extinct dodo bird is a myth propagated and maintained by the archeological community. This can be expanded to pretty much anything. Is the Earth really beneath you, or is it just an illusion? What exactly is real?

 

One of the old dead Greeks has a great quote about the only thing one can be certain of is one's own existence. I'm too lazy to find it.

[ex post slarto]

Originally Posted By: Erasmus

It all comes down to what belief is acceptable enough for you to believe in it.

Right. Whether you're talking about history or about science, the theory you believe is the theory that is best supported by the evidence you have.

When the evidence is split, or mostly points away from a certain theory, it's kind of a head-scratcher for me to assume that theory is true, or to present it as a simple truth.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Master1

What Erasmus is saying is that one can never be absolutely certain in any natural fact. It is theoretically possible that the existence of the now-extinct dodo bird is a myth propagated and maintained by the archeological community. This can be expanded to pretty much anything. Is the Earth really beneath you, or is it just an illusion? What exactly is real?

One of the old dead Greeks has a great quote about the only thing one can be certain of is one's own existence. I'm too lazy to find it.

If you're going to disbelieve mountains of evidence from the experts and your own senses just because you can, your own existence doesn't get a free pass. Maybe you aren't, in fact, real.

Dikiyoba just wants to know why the archeologists are the ones perpetrating the dinosaur hoax. Are the paleontologists in on it too, or it some sort of weird interdisciplinary rivalry?

[Alorael at Large]

You can't be absolutely certain of anything, but there's lack of absolute certainty and there's knowledge of uncertainty. There's no real evidence for the absence of historical dodos. There's plenty of evidence both ways for Alexander's assumption of divinity. The same source says it both ways!

 

—Alorael, who can only assume Plutarch was trying to create a smokescreen for the true secret: Plutarch was the son of a demigod, a very nice urn, and three fir trees. He had a very complicated conception and a very confusing childhood.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Dikiyoba just wants to know why the archeologists are the ones perpetrating the dinosaur hoax. Are the paleontologists in on it too, or it some sort of weird interdisciplinary rivalry?

The field of paleontology doesn't actually exist. That's just a myth perpetuated by archaeologists.

[Rowen]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Dikiyoba just wants to know why the archeologists are the ones perpetrating the dinosaur hoax. Are the paleontologists in on it too, or it some sort of weird interdisciplinary rivalry?

The field of paleontology doesn't actually exist. That's just a myth perpetuated by archaeologists.

Having just re-read Motel of the Mysteries I know the truth about archaeologists and the wannabes. Time to burn down every museum in existence and free ourselves of the lies!

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES

Originally Posted By: Erasmus

It all comes down to what belief is acceptable enough for you to believe in it.

Right. Whether you're talking about history or about science, the theory you believe is the theory that is best supported by the evidence you have.

When the evidence is split, or mostly points away from a certain theory, it's kind of a head-scratcher for me to assume that theory is true, or to present it as a simple truth.

False. The theory one believes in is very rarely dictated by evidence, but rather by the personal paradigms governing the individual. While many individuals do favor evidence and logic as worldviews, others instead accept theories that, while fitting into their worldviews, are blatantly incorrect, and then refuse to alter them, even when confronted by irrefutable facts.

For an example less controversial than the obvious one I was going to use, just look at the birth-certificate controversy in the US. Over 40% of Republicans believed a blatant falsehood unsupported by fact or logic, because it fit into their mindset better than reality.

[ex post slarto]

Quite right Dantius! I should have said "the way you like to think you decide what theory to believe, according to your intellectual ideals, is..." rather than "the theory you believe is..."

[Ceiling Durkheim]

It's also worth keeping in mind that being a demigod back then didn't mean as much as it did in some eras. q.v. the Roman emperors, who were not merely demigods but full gods.

[Alorael at Large]

So you're saying we've had god power creep?

 

—Alorael, who can buy that. He'd better get a booster pack soon or he'll be behind the divinity curve.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

By and large, yes. Though the current God of the Gaps that many people subscribe to is kind of a divine Fallen Empires.

[Student of Trinity]

It may be worth distinguishing several different meanings of 'belief'. I can think of several that are even all reasonable, in my opinion — as opposed to Pratchett's, which is simply an idiosyncratic definition of the term 'belief' to mean only 'belief without strong evidence'.

 

There is the belief that one never even thinks to question — like, whether the ceiling over one's head will stay up for the next half hour. In principle it could collapse, but the chances that it will are too low to be worth even thinking about, let alone guarding against.

 

There is confident belief based on careful investigation of conclusive evidence. I don't think this happens very often.

 

There is belief based on moderate to weak preponderance of evidence, plus curiosity, plus apathy. When you really don't care either way, but would like to have a conclusion one way or the other, and the evidence seems to tilt in one direction, then you decide to believe that way. If you weren't so keen to have an opinion, you might very well just accept ignorance. And if you were personally affected by the issue, you might be a lot more worried about jumping to a conclusion too quickly. But as it is, you believe something.

 

(This last form of belief is fine enough in the appropriate circumstances, which are common. It is sometimes confused with the previous one, by people who want to believe they are rational people, but don't really understand reason very well.)

 

Finally (on my top-of-head list) there is the case where the evidence is inconclusive, and you know this, but you still decide to bet heavily on one possibility being true — to the degree that you may as well burn your ships and ignore the alternative, except as a hypothetical possibility.

 

This means believing something, I would say, in the sense that whenever you think seriously about the world, the world you think about is one in which that something is true. But I could say that this is belief without meta-belief: you do not believe that your first belief amounts to certain knowledge. You acknowledge that it is a bet. You just don't fold; you're in for the showdown.

 

I think this last sense of belief is the one that is involved in religious faith, though it appears in many other contexts as well. Quite obviously it can be wrong. But so can any of the others. And in fact, if I had to justify rigorously the reasonableness of any one of the four forms of belief I have listed, I would take my chances with the fourth one by preference. I strongly suspect that the other three are only defensible by boiling them down to the fourth. Ockham's razor is a sharp blade, but it has no hilt.

 

Presumably the form of belief as deliberate bet is less unlikely to be wrong than the belief based on careful investigation of conclusive evidence. But conclusive evidence is rare, and yet there are many cases where decisive action is a better strategy than fence-sitting. People who can exercise this kind of belief can accomplish things others can't, because they can follow a plan without the overhead cost of being continually supplied with firm evidence that the plan is working. Faith is a virtue.

[Erebus the Black]

Slarty could you explain what is your point of disagreement,

As I can see it there are 5 possibilities:

1: Alexander was a demigod.

2: Alexander's mother told him he was a demigod in secret and then denied it in public.

3: Alexander was spreading rumors about himself and his mother and his mother was denying them vigorously.

4: Someone else started the rumor.

5: Plutarch was a fiction writer (like Shakespeare and his stories about Julius Cesar (et tu brute) or Henry III).

 

In all cases this started a myth about Alexander which reached our times.

If you read Plut. a few pages back you'll see him saying about the myth (I'm paraphrasing): Demi-god my ass, his mother liked to participate a lot in religious orgies and that's where she probably got him.

[ex post slarto]

Your possibilities list is pretty short. For example, you ignore the possibility that Plutarch attempted to write history, but was not omniscient and therefore goofed up repeatedly, often due to the lack of speedy and especially of written information transfer in his time. Or that he made assumptions.

 

Regardless, you stated "He WAS told..." (my emphasis)... you stated very specifically that somebody told him this stuff as a child, and we don't know that. This could be more thoroughly resolved by doing a rigorous search through all available evidence, but given the general time-tested unreliability of rumours-reported-by-one-ancient-historian-and-contradicted-by-other-writers, that is an awful lot of effort to go through, to move up one on SoT's categories-of-certainty-scale, for a fact no one cares about.

 

We can't explicitly rule out that Plutarch was actually correct, but it seems unlikely (or at best uncertain) in light of the easily available evidence. You can say "let's do a rigorous search through the evidence!" and you can also say "I think it does seem likely, based on evidence X Y and Z"... but saying "no, we should just assume it is what happened" doesn't work here since the rest of us are skeptical.

[Frozen Feet]

You know, this is the only forum I know of where random post count threads turn into deep conversations about history and nature of belief.

 

To go off a tangent, I agree with SoT's writing of kinds of belief. I'd like to posit, however, that the second most common type of belief involved with religion is the first kind. When a belief becomes ingrained enough in a person's mind, it becomes a fact of life. I think this is witnessed in many animistic societies and everyday believers - you don't really wonder whether paying respects to spirits or ancestors is worth it, because of course they exist.

[Erebus the Black]

It seems to me we are arguing about two different points, so if I may I will add a third (until we clear up what we are arguing about):

Your new point stems from the 5th, you are differentiating two types of fiction, intentional fiction (better known as a lie, bard's stories are still lies albeit magnificent ones) and an unintentional fiction (better known as a mistake).

 

Here for example are the words of a historian obviously lying to make Rome look good:

Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Many they sawed in two, from the head downwards. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators.

 

Anyone with a bit of knowledge about Jewish tradition knows that these acts are strictly forbidden and are punished by death.

 

More Roman lies you can find about by watching Terry Jones' Barbarians.

 

Other than that I agree with you that Alexander was not necessarily told ... by his mother.

However the myth of the telling has perpetuated to this day and is repeated in many modern sources.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Erasmus

Your new point stems from the 5th, you are differentiating two types of fiction, intentional fiction (better known as a lie, bard's stories are still lies albeit magnificent ones) and an unintentional fiction (better known as a mistake).

neither of these things are actually what the word "fiction" means

[Erebus the Black]

to the best of my knowledge fiction is derived from fictitious which means made up.

[Alorael at Large]

Fiction generally requires deliberate creation as a story. A lie isn't fiction unless the lie is a story; a mistake isn't fiction because it isn't intended.

 

Here's your problem, Erasmus:

Quote:

He was told by his mother all of his childhood that he was the son of god and a god himself and ended conquering a very large percentage of the (then) known world

That's a statement of fact. Then you provide the quote from Plutarch, and it shows that the older authors he cites had no agreement on whether or not Alexander's mother told him he was a god. There is no preponderance of evidence. We're not even arguing about what Plutarch says, because he makes no claims about what Alexander was told beyond reporting that some say he was told one thing and some say he was told something else.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the basic problem people are having here is that you make a strong claim based on very little evidence. He might have been told by his mother, but there's not even a preponderance of evidence for SoT's third type of belief. There is some weak evidence for and against it, which has been repeated to modern times, and nobody knows for certain.

[Erebus the Black]

And I have retracted that statement, instead I showed the origin of the myth because SoT stated he never heard of it.

As for the dispute of fiction I can only blame it on the language barrier.

[ex post slarto]

Language barrier?!? What's your native language? Your English reads as fluent to my eyes!

[Frozen Feet]

Fun fact: many of us foreigners type much better English than native speakers because we're more self-conscious of our language and worried of being misunderstood. It sometimes leads to funny cases like this, where a fluent writer is apologizing for a mistake that's only apparent to him or herself.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Frozen Feet

Fun fact: many of us foreigners type much better English than native speakers because we're more self-conscious of our language and worried of being misunderstood. It sometimes leads to funny cases like this, where a fluent writer is apologizing for a mistake that's only apparent to him or herself.

It's little things like using "of" rather than "about" that tips me off to non-native speakers (even though I got your meaning perfectly). I haven't spotted any of those in Erasmus' posts.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Frozen Feet

Fun fact: many of us foreigners type much better English than native speakers because we're more self-conscious of our language and worried of being misunderstood. It sometimes leads to funny cases like this, where a fluent writer is apologizing for a mistake that's only apparent to him or herself.

I never really learned English grammar or mechanics very well, I probably have a better grasp of French grammar, atrocious as mine is, than English- if you asked me what the past imperfect form of "to swim" was,I'd probably just stare at you. This I probably because my "English" classes were pretty much literature with some grammar on the side, whereas my French classes were the other way around, mainly grammar with a side of literature.

Of course, four decades of immersion do do wonders for your spoken language, even if my ability to properly use "whom" instead of ending with prepositions is somewhat lacking.

[Alorael at Large]

"Had been verbing" is actually the past perfect progressive. English doesn't have an explicit form for imperfect; you can use the progressive for it, as in "I was swimming (when...)" or "I swam (back then)" or "I would swim a lot (every summer)."

 

—Alorael, who brings you this post so that a real linguist or grammarian can show him how it's really done.

[A less presumptuous name.]

I concur with Alorael. English doesn't like to change the actual verb nearly as much as it likes to add "helping" verbs. A number of regular verbs have only a handful of forms, such as "walk." Walk, walks, walked, walking. You can make any tense for any subject from those, unless I am mistaken. Oh, and the infinitive, of course.

[ex post slarto]

Wikipedia has a reasonable summary here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense#English

 

Which gives you something like:

 

PRESENT:

I eat

 

PRESENT PROGRESSIVE:

I am eating

 

PRESENT PERFECT:

I have eaten

 

PRESENT PERFECT PROGRESSIVE:

I have been eating

 

PAST: ( = CLASSICAL "PERFECT")

I ate

 

PAST PROGRESSIVE: ( = CLASSICAL "IMPERFECT")

I was eating

 

PAST PERFECT: ( = "PLUPERFECT")

I had eaten

 

PAST PERFECT PROGRESSIVE:

I had been eating

 

FUTURE:

I will eat

 

FUTURE PROGRESSIVE:

I will be eating

 

FUTURE PERFECT:

I will have eaten

 

FUTURE PERFECT PROGRESSIVE

I will have been eating

 

Note that there are other, totally separate constructions that can communicate tense and aspect. For example, "I am going to eat" means basically the same thing as "I will eat" despite the verb itself being present progressive.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

Of course, weird Frankenlanguage that English is, there are a lot of verbs with irregular tenses, and conjugations more generally. "Swam" in the above example, for instance, as the imperfect/past progressive form of swim.

 

(I'm with Dinosaur Comics on the inordinate affection for the future perfect passive continuous/progressive. I will have been being eaten! (Though of course passive is a voice, not a tense. Also, nested parentheses are fun.))

[ex post slarto]

Irregular and quasi-irregular conjugations, yes, everywhere. But what verbs (aside from verbs used as modals, which is not quite the same thing) have irregular tenses? Swim, for example, has "swam" as the simple past and "was swimming" as the past progressive. Not any different from anything else. Why would "swam" be the past progressive?

 

Edit: Are you just saying that "I swam" is of imperfect aspect? That's sort of true, but since English also has the progressive distinction, the simple past can really go either way; "I swam" means that at some point I swam, and it may have been a single instantaneous swim or a continuous habitual state. It's not as clear cut as, for example, Latin perfect and imperfect.

[Dintiradan]

My favourite tense is the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Subjunctive Intentional.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: FnordCola

Of course, weird Frankenlanguage that English is

True, but I highly doubt you'll find a richer goldmine for producing puns.

[Ceiling Durkheim]

I'm in a good mood tonight. The subjunctive, to be precise.

 

@Slarty: What I mean is that it has an extra form relative to some. Actually, eat is the same now that I think about it. Consider "talk" according to your list: talk/am talking/have talked/have been talking/talked/was talking/had talked/had been talking...etc. In all, we have three inflections, talk/talking/talked, along with various auxiliary words. For swim, we have swim/swimming/swam/swum. For eating, eat/eating/eaten/ate. So really, what I was getting (with painful lack of clarity, upon reflection) was that there are two past inflections, swam/swum and eaten/ate, instead of one, like talked, worked, shopped, etc.

[Student of Trinity]

Spring is sprung,

Da grass is riz.

I wonder where dem boidies iz.

Da little boids is on da wing.

Ain't dat absoid?

Da little wings is on da boid!

[A less presumptuous name.]

My understanding is that F is saying that some verbs are different regarding the simple past and the past participle. For example, "walk" only has a single form - I walked - I have walked, whereas verbs like "run" have different forms - I ran - I have run.

 

A way that I think of this is that both verbs have the same number of forms, it's just that two forms of the first group of verbs are identical.

 

 

Reading all of this, I can imagine that, were I a Frenchman learning English, I would be relieved and confused at the same time.

[Alorael at Large]

As best I can tell, nearly all English verbs only have three real conjugations: infinitive, past, and perfect/participle. Everything else is a simple modification. Specifically, append -ing to the infinitive to make a progressive and append S for present-tense third person singular. Many verbs have identical past and participle forms, but it's not something you can count on.

 

"To be" is an exception, of course (are there any languages in which it's a non-irregular verb?), but there aren't many others.

 

—Alorael, who concludes that English conjugation is easy. It's memorizing all those triads of eat/ate/eaten, drink/drank/drunk, go/went/gone.

[Masquerade]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

This week the trend... is making postcount threads?

Given all this discussion, I think the theme of the week (or perhaps just these forums in general) is to go wildly galavanting off topic at the slightest provocation.

So how bout this weather we've been having? pretty hectic huh.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Masquerade

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

This week the trend... is making postcount threads?

Given all this discussion, I think the theme of the week (or perhaps just these forums in general) is to go wildly galavanting off topic at the slightest provocation.

So how bout this weather we've been having? pretty hectic huh.

That is the trend all the time, in every thread, in every section of this forum. I'm surprised you haven't realized this by now .

[Student of Trinity]

We're trying to make a fractal, here.