Now, those I have a lot of patience with.
It's not slander, it's libel.
You are quite right. I should have been more precise.
I would say that if multiple people are misunderstanding your argument, it is possible that your communication is not perfectly clear.
An entirely reasonable suggestion, but in this case the preponderance of evidence is that the misunderstanding on that point is not my fault. There may be, and probably are, plenty of other areas however where I'm not being clear. But on that point, barring the possibility you can actually show me where the misunderstanding came from, I don't think I'm at fault - since among other things I've plainly stated the opposite multiple times. Rather I think the more likely explanation is you are conflating what I'm saying with what someone else said in some other conversation, and you are responding to me as if I was that other person.
That's great! And as they say, "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Now, I could discuss my expertise in textual criticism, the multiple journals I have published in, the time I have spent editing other people's work, or my current job, or it might be self-evident from my history of posts (it is better to show than to tell).* What I can certainly tell you is that while I appreciate your expertise in bioinformatics, it is not transferable. I think that was the point of my post.
Oh, good. Because I was assuming that your desire to not see science and textual criticism compared, was coming from something of the opposite place, that science was 'Science' and that textual criticism was something that could just be dismissed because it was not 'Science'. That you are an expert in textual criticism only makes this conversation easier.
Perhaps when you have spent a great amount of time thinking about, studying, and arguing this particular issue, when you can confidently discuss both the many schools of textual criticism (not just in literature, but generally) as well as understand the great indeterminacy of text (for an example see the canons of statutory construction, see also Karl Llewellyn). I certainly wish that it was a matter of complete objectivity and scientific rigor; it would make my life easier in so many ways. Perhaps, since you have it down to a science, you will publish your methods in journals that do not deal with bioinformatics so the rest of us may learn from them?**
That said, given your earlier statements regarding textual criticism, I do not believe you are as fully versed in the subject as you are in bioinformatics.
Quite. But my point was rather the opposite of what you think it is. Rather than arguing that textual criticism was as easy as science and therefore we could state as much with confidence about a text as we might over a very simple piece of data like a genetic sequence that in fact science shared with textual criticism many of the same ambiguities that textual criticism has, and that therefore it was not insulting science to draw the comparison. On the contrary, I would tend to argue that scientists underestimate the difficulties in dealing with the data (and in some cases do this deliberately, which is a big problem in science right now), and therefore tend to overestimate the strength of their conclusions. Or to put it another way, if you believe science is about complete objectivity and perfectly firm conclusions and absolute rigor, then you probably don't do science.
Perhaps you simply misunderstand that statement, "textual criticism is not a science, and attempting to add the veneer of scientific precision to it does a disservice to both criticism and science." I thought that was sufficiently clear. I do not think you are libeling me- just a failure to communicate, something that often happens since words are imprecise, and miscommunication happens. You know this from Wittgenstein and Gusdorf though.
Actually, as far as Wittgenstein goes, yes - though I've not read Gusdorf. But again, while textual criticism is not science, not being science does not mean it is not knowledge or that it completely lacking in rigor. And fundamentally, we both seem to believe that there is some evidence that can be uncovered and that reasonable people can be convinced by the strength of the argument that this explanation best fits the evidence - which is all that science is, so whether it is science or not isn't really relevant.
*After all, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. Also, I mean, c'mon. Argumentum ad verecundiam on the internet between anonymous internet commenters? Is someone's dad totally going to beat up someone else's dad?
Don't assume that I'm going to be in anyway threatened by your expertise. Quite the contrary, knowing who you are helps me understand the context of your statements and makes them clearer rather than less clear. And for that matter, I don't believe that either of us has made an argument ad vercundiam, since neither is asking the other to believe what we say based on our expertise alone. You can validly put forth your expertise in the subject as contributing evidence that you ought to be believed.