Re: Barbara Thiering Refuted!

On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 05:09:44 GMT, dk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (DK)
wrote:

In article <h6esu21fe2rccda63uakrt5ql5ksucptoe@xxxxxxx>, eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 01:46:52 GMT, dk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (DK)
wrote:

In article <h0jru2tvplqc88khj6ggi36gg993uumt9h@xxxxxxx>,
eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
In the case of Barbara Thiering, the fact that one particular person
cannot be trained to use her pesher method of reading to obtain the
same result as she does, does not mean that her method is invalid. If
that person _will_not_ be so trained then that person cannot be
trained.

The lamest, the most Marxist, and the most unscientific defense of
them all. That's like claiming that Khmer Rouge did not succeed
only because they did not believe the true communism well enough.

The difference, of course, is that once a reasonable person proves
to be reasonably trainable (in a wide-ranging world of cultural
archaeology or whatever you opt to call ir, of, arbitrarily, getting
a Ph.D. or publishing some papers in respected journals), then
the inability to believe Barbara Thiering's message indicates just
one and the only thing:
Barbara Thiering's message is not convincing.
(Surprise! The whole thing, from A to Z, reads like a shamanism
worse then Freudian psychoanalysis. Both, naturally, are as
anti-Popperian as anything can be.)


You are talking nonsense.

And I think you are ... below. Defending indefensible, the utterly
non-scientific "method", e.g. the method that cannot be
independently reproduced, and much less falsified.

We are not talking about the reasonable
person but the person who is determined to learn the pesher style of
reading.

Well, what in the world prevents an array of reasonable persons
to intercept significantly with an array of persons determined to learn
the pesher style of reading? (That's a rhetoric question, BTW).

It might be a rhetorical question but you are changing the subject. We
started off with one person who may or may not want to learn to read
pesher. Now we have an array of people. Hopefully there will be at
least some who genuinely want to try the hypothesis. This leads to the
next point of whether or not they get consistent and meaningful
results.

Even if the scholar wants to read pesher there is no guarantee that
they will come up with exactly the same conclusion as another scholar.
One only has to follow up the attempts to reach agreement over the
meaning of ancient runic documents to see how difficult it is to reach
agreement.

In which case the pesher thing is suspect at best and a bunch of
random imagination at worst.

No more so than the runic inscriptions I had in mind. They meant
something to the people who originally wrote them. The question is
whether or not we can agree amongst ourselves as to what they mean.
The fact that today people can't agree on this does not necessarily
render the ancient originals invalid.



Eric Stevens
.

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