Dr. Peterson Dismisses the Dismissal of Hero Skousen

[_Gadianton]

To the point about critics not having read or willing to put the time into reading Skousen's arguments, at least the two thick volumes just published: I'd like to point out that none of the apologists jumping aboard and agreeing with him have not read these books either.

[_Kishkumen]

To the point about critics not having read or willing to put the time into reading Skousen's arguments, at least the two thick volumes just published: I'd like to point out that none of the apologists jumping aboard and agreeing with him have not read these books either.

I am happy about the whole thing. It is just so delightfully kooky. I am surprised by the commitment to this odd tack, but I am not overly surprised that Smith’s attempts to mimic the voice of the KJV succeeded in unexpected ways. You take the New England vernacular of several generations and siphon it through emulation of the King James, and of course you get some interesting bits here and there.

But, hey, far be it from me to discourage the Ghost Committee Theory. I am in love with lit. I’m Trumpin all over that Kim Jong-un.

[_Lemmie]

To the point about critics not having read or willing to put the time into reading Skousen's arguments, at least the two thick volumes just published: I'd like to point out that none of the apologists jumping aboard and agreeing with him have not read these books either.

And yet, a number of posters here have looked at Carmack's articles and research in some depth. Off the top of my head, I recall Runtu giving a pretty specific review of some of his earlier works where he looked in detail at many of the associations Carmack relied upon and pointed out some errors. I spent a fair amount of time reviewing the statistical methodology of his last two papers, and expressed my opinion that it was too disjointed and scattered to use in coming to his overarching conclusions.

Symmachus talked about at least one of those papers as well. He made a number of really detailed posts about how the type of analysis Carmack is using is not an acceptable approach, and in fact is entirely insufficient to rely upon for the conclusions Carmack is coming to.

In any case, I think either Carmack reads here or our resident, rotund lurker clued him in. My evidence in thinking this is as follows, starting with a representative post from Carmack on August 14th:

This is uncontroversial descriptive linguistic work, after all. When one notes that the Book of Mormon has 8 of an archaism, and the King James Bible has 5, and that pseudo-biblical texts have none, then it is a mere description of an identifiable linguistic reality.
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/708 ... 1209843110

One doesn't have to be a linguist to imagine Symmachus' response to that. Even worse, the next day, he posted this:

If we were to spell the earliest text like a 1500s text and punctuate it like a 16c text, and have it printed in a book that looked hundreds of years old, with ragged type, then it would strike us a lot more like an early modern text...

There are thousands of things in the earliest text that are like what is found in Early Modern English: individual usages and systematic patterns that are not (pseudo)biblical or modern....

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/708 ... 1209843281

Speaking as an academic, that's just embarrassing.

During that time frame, Summachus posted this:

In any case, if you read enough early modern English, you'll realize that the proponents of the theory that the Book of Mormon is in early Modern English depend for their claims on people's general ignorance of this stage of the language (and perhaps also their own ignorance of it). That is why all of the arguments are corpus-based and offer up bits of decontextualized data: they run a search on a given corpus (like the OED), call it "data," then run their analysis. They depend on your not appreciating the wider linguistic context from which these data are culled....

In my opinion, Carmack finally paid some attention to Symmachus, or at least to someone who thinks very much like him, because two days later, look at the complete change of mindset in Carmack's posting, as evidenced in this following excerpt:

And they don't actually know what Early Modern English was like. If you want to know what it was like, you have to read many texts from many genres and time periods. You have to read linguistic studies. You have to study corpora and search them thousands of times. You have to read and analyze lots of archaic language.
http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/708 ... 1209844143

Finally!

Bottom line, Peterson is being his usual facetious self when he says critics haven't read any of the research. He knows better.

I'd also like to think that Peterson knows it's not really a peer-reviewed journal if the referees have to pledge that they are not hostile to lds truth claims, but I'm not so sanguine about that.

[_Philo Sofee]

Lemmie
Bottom line, Peterson is being his usual facetious self when he says critics haven't read any of the research. He knows better.

I suspect Peterson is looking more for people who will simply agree with claims made, rather than actually engaging in discussing the strengths and weaknesses of various sundry theories of Mormon testimony building through scripture analysis. No Mormon really wants to get into serious analysis, they want to be affirmed their belief in Moroni or St. Paul or St. Francis of Assisi is held bonded tightly in the arms of the Holy Spirit and is just true. No need to raise questions and discuss methodolgy for the faithful.