> A good analogy, perhaps, is a dictionary. A
>dictionary defines words in terms of...other
>words, whose meaning are determined in the
>dictionary. If you look up one word, you have
>to look up several more, and eventually you get
>back to the words you had to look up in the
>first place. Well, if someone handed you a
>Swahili dictionary, it's doubtful that you'd be
>able to learn the language, much less make a
>convincing argument to someone else about your
>conclusions, but if Someone gives those
>diligently seeking to learn the language the
>first handful of the words, you could look up
>definitions that use those words and learn
>others, and use them to learn others, and use
>them to learn others, and use them to learn
>others, and use them to learn others, and if it
>weren't obvious this is where the cyclic part
>comes in, and yet, even assuming an infinitely
>large dictionary, there is no logical fallacy in
>this kind of learning unless the initial words
>were wrong, and yet, if the initial words were
>wrong, how could this expansive and intricate
>dictionary make continue to make sense with
>every iteration? Eventually the statistical
>probability that the initial words were
>incorrect become so minutely small that, if one
>encounters a seeming inconsistency in the
>dictionary, the error has a far greater chance
>of being in misunderstanding of a definition in
>a recent iteration rather than an error in the
>whole kit and kaboodle.

Well, it's not exactly unprecedented for that very thing to happen. In the history of archeology there are many instances of scholars working from a wrong set of assumptions and coming up with translations of entire languages that turn out to not be true. How do they manage that? Well, it's open for debate, really, but the suspected explanations are that either they're lying completely and are just making everything up, or, more likely, they get attached to an interpretation after working with it for so long that they start massaging the data to fit their theory rather than accepting the flaw in their theory and starting over from a different set of assumptions.

Obviously I'm not accusing you of lying about your interpretation. But you've basically already admitted to the second explanation. You've said that if the data doesn't fit the theory, you back up a step and look at it again. But you've *also* said that if you can't find any explanation for the discrepancy, instead of then questioning the theory, you accept that the explanation will be forthcoming and push onward. Sometimes I agree that this is a valid way to move foward--scientists will use this method if they suspect a gap in their knowledge that doesn't yet let them see the reason this "doesn't work". However, my point is that you can't do this indefinitely. This can't be your main operating procedure, or you're not being intellectually honest. The scientists who get married to a theory like this end up spending their lives obsessively trying to work out their pet theory instead of doing the *right* thing and realizing the theory is flawed and moving on.

Worse, if your very theory demands that you not question it's basic suppositions, then the theory is not intellectually honest either and I submit, again, that it has no claim to Truth.

I know you don't believe you're doing this. I know you believe that you *are* getting your answers as you move on, and that the answers you don't yet have will be forthcoming, or perhaps are not important enough to worry about. But again, I believe it's very likely that I could sit down with a book of Egyptian Heiroglyphics and a sheet of paper that translates five basic symbols (incorrectly), and from there I could come up with a completely consistent and yet wholely *wrong* translation of that book. I know this because it *has happened* before.

-- Dave