Truth and Truthiness, anew

[an update to this essay:

     https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/02/truth-vs-truthiness-updated.html

There, the examples cited were mostly political and snarky, in line with the comic coinage “truthiness” itself.  But there are many genuine questions concerning the penumbra of truth.  Here are some examples, from the years before Stephen Colbert was in nappies. ]

~

“Is she mixed up with the Consular people?”
“Oh, no.  Her work lies among the poor.”

This was a side-slip into truth.  The mother of Adrian was employed in a laundry.

-- H. H. Munro, “Adrian” (1911), in The Short Stories of Saki (1904ff), p. 157

~

“That’s only true with reservations.  And the reservations are the most important part.”

--Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (1925), p. 377

~

Re Baroque art:

It is not real cloud or real sun, and does not pretend to be; but it does, as it were, pretend to pretend.  It is theatrical; but a theatrical performance is not a falsehood, for it does not profess to be a fact.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (1930)

Despite the paradoxical sound of the phrase, people do indeed often pretend to pretend.  As, when Daddy mimics a bear or a pirate, to amuse the children.

~

So much for pinchbeck truth.  As for the pure gold:

Something is really true; true in every aspect  and from every angle;  true from the four quarters of the sky;  true by the three dimensions of the Trinity.  We turn from it  and it does not vanish;  we analyze it  and it does not dissolve.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (1930)

Granted, the things he has in mind are such as people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins  would actually hold to be false.

~

For further essays on truth, see:

     https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/truth

For truth’s truthitudinal poor-relation, these posts:

     https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/truthiness

(Those are the funny ones.)

Light on (in) Canvas

Anent the Douanier:

The light that fills Rousseau’s paintings  from no apparent source or direction  holds everything in peaceful equilibrium. …

Rousseau painted only three lights:  high noon, moonlight, and the uniform floodlighting of a photographer’s studio. …

The formal effects of his light  guard the enigma of his work, the feeling that we cannot fathom   its sheer simplicity. …

The most singular quality of his work arises from the steady light that floods his compositions  and hushes them  as the world can be hushed  only by high noon and by moonlight.

-- Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years:  The Origins of the Avan-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1955), p. 105-6

Note:  All that Shattuck says about the formal qualities of  these paintings  is no doubt true.  But there is a Chance-the-gardener aspect to Rousseau, which should caution us against reading too much into “the enigma of his work, the feeling that we cannot fathom its sheer simplicity.”  Similar remarks apply to Utrillo.   The life (if we can call it that) and work  of Henry Darger, are the final caveat against taking a master of composition as anything but a visual guide.  It represents Asperger’s Esthetics only.

Giving the devil his due (and no more)

[In response to a reader's comment to this essay,
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2020/04/coincidence-and-cosmos.html
we add this note.]

Two of my favorite Christian authors, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis,  offer antithetical depictions of the Devil.  Chesterton’s is more romantic and medieval:

Roses are redder  when you believe in the Devil.

Lewis’s, by contrast, in the Silent Planet trilogy, Screwtape and The Great Divorce, depicts what we might call the Trivial Devil (though no less dangerous for all that).  There is no romance to him; there is, we may say, Nothing to Recommend Him.  He is no Satanic Majesty, but more like a Satanic Misery,  a Satanic Minionism -- a Mere Mechanism.  And as a mechanism, he is given to chitter-chattery repe(titi)tition.

An example of what we could term a “diabolical” coincidence, in this Lewisian sense,  occurs in “The Matrix”, when a black cat (Satan in miniature, as it might be) passes, right to left, outside the doorway, and then, right after that, or sort of seguing into it, a -- a black cat passes, right to left, outside the doorway.   Neo remarks on the coincidence, merely curious, but his more seasoned team-mates are instantly more knowing and alarmed, for they recognize a revealing glitch in the diabolical master-program and runs the Matrix.   The faults and behaviors of the dark lords who run the place, are eminently mechanical, since they are, in fact, machines.

Proustian footnote (on psalmody)

A further prosodic wrinkle  is that the doxology is often performed while drawing out the final three or four syllables of each line:

Praise God, from Whom all blesss - sings - flooowww;

Praise Him, all creatures   heere -  beee - looowwww;

Praise Him above, ye Heaven - lyy -  Hooost;

Praise Father, Son, and  Ho - lyy - Ghooost.

Compare this Proustian observation:

Le marchand d’habits psalmodiait: « Habits, marchand d’habits,  ha… bits »,  avec la même pause entre les deux dernières syllabes d’habits  que s’il eût entonné en plain-chant: « Per omnia saecula saeculo… rum » …

-- Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière (1919; p. 118 of the Pléiade edition)

[The above is an afterpiece to the following essay:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/01/orthoepy-of-doxology.html  ]

Implicit Knowledge (nursery edition)

We earlier shared an anecdote of implicit or “chrysalis-enclosed” knowledge, from an introspective five-year-old of our acquaintance:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/09/implicit-vs-active-knowledge.html

Compare this childhood reminiscence of a boy growing up on the Upper East Side:

I remember my grandmother’s house quite well.  It was a very cold formal place.  There was an enormous marble entrace hall …

We behaved extremely well.  We knew the rules inside out  without knowing the rules.

Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 120

“Friending” -- Then and Now

In a book  valuably organized by neighborhood, we hear an Upper West Side resident, Olga Marx (b. 1894):

On New Year’s Day, all the women stayed at home  to receive callers. … When a man would call, it was a sign of gentility to leave an engraved visiting-card in an urn at the door.  Then my mother would use them to compare with friends.  Of course, it was very important to have more cards than anybody else.

-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 203

[Note]  Most of the testimony in Kisseloff’s engaging collection  comes from ordinary folks, but often with a solid street-eloquence.   The woman looking-back in the above quotation  was Olga Marx, one of the more observant of Kisseloff’s informants (or “witnesses”  as he calls them).   Also one of the better educated -- Barnard, then a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr.   There followed a modest literary life.  But what caught my eye  was this detail:  she published “several mysteries for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.”    Salutations from across the decades, Dr. Marx!  That magazine is also where I got my start, chronicling the saga of the Murphy Brothers, Private Investigators.   You can check out the action  here:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

COINCIDENCE AND COSMOS

[The following is from a letter sent to a friend, who had reported a troubling coincidence, some years ago.]

~

COINCIDENCE AND COSMOS

I don’t see those two coincidences – yours or mine – as particularly startling.  But neither my being unimpressed, nor your being impressed, should weigh particularly heavily in the epistemological balance-pan.  For mankind is notoriously incapable of estimating probabilities in most instances.

One of the side benefits of faith is supposed to be  that it preserves us from superstitions that might otherwise get sucked in to the vacuum where faith should be. (Chesterton was fond of emphasizing, and dramatizing, this point.)  Actually I was never superstitiously inclined, even before baptism; but now there is a warrant to just wave these things off – things superficially much more suggestive.   For, I don’t believe that God communicates via such hole-in-corner monkey-tricks.

Such incidents, when they crop up, are undeniably intriguing.  The appeal seems to be  that they hint at a pattern on the other side of the carpet, which we see only wrong-side-on.  But then, as theists, we already know that; we don’t need the occasional odd chiming of chance, to tell us so.  What is worthy only of Las Vegas, should stay in Vegas.

*

One of the things  I’ve been doing with my new-found, fiber-furnished bandwidth, is watching free online episodes of a TV series, “Lost”.   The whole thing is predicated on Baader-Meinhof phenomena.   

The problem with that  as the basis for a multi-year series, is that it is all too easy to conjure up.  Just as magic tricks are yawners if performed on television, which can always resort to special effects, so spooky coincidences are startling only if they happen to you.   It’s a very lazy genre.   For comedy to work, it has to be funny; and even a decent car-chase is not easy to stage.  But any footling apprentice can have a stranger say (after you meet him in an empty stadium in Australia, and then part company), “See you in another life”; and then a few minutes later, a world away on a mysterious island, in a bunker far below the earth, you run into the same guy, now wild-eyed and bearded, and stammer, “Y-y-y-you….!”   Still, “Lost” not a boring show.  The whole art consists in having an artfully selected Bridge-over-San-Luis-Rey set of castaways  -- the pert freckled girl, the doughty doctor whose stubble is never shorter nor longer than a four-day growth, the Black guy, the Fat guy, the this-and-that guy – and send them through a minuet of interactions, spiced by tingly synchronicities,  so that the coincidences become tonal, as in music.

Featuring prominently among the guiding coincidences of the show is a short sequence of small integers, arranged in order.  Fat Guy overhears a mental patient (whom the numbers have driven mad) muttering them over and over, and with them, wins the lottery!  Woo-ooo!  But then very bad things start happening to everyone he goes near!! Woo-oo-ooo!  And then they turn up engraved at the entrance to that bunker!  Woo-oo-ooo-oo-oooo!  The sequence, unremarkable upon inspection…

Actually, I must confess at this point, that I am loath to write the sequence down, though it is only the whim of a TV show.  It is not superstition exactly; more like, “Get thee behind me…”  For, although God does not communicate by such monkey-tricks, the Devil might…  Anyhow, it contains an old favorite “23”.   An otherwise highly intelligent friend of mine  was mesmerized by this number, whose spectral footprint seemed to be everywhere.  It turns out he is not alone in his obsession; an entire movie was made (unfortunately, not a good one), about the eerie qualities of this integer.

*

There is one place where startling coincidences really are intriguing; and it is as far from Old Pagan or New Age spookery as possible.  I mean:  math and science.  For, the same underlying structures keep popping up in a variety of guises; the wild kaleidoscope of the world  appears, upon analysis, to be dreamed up out of a few symmetries  and a few bits of colored glass.

Here too it is possible to go astray, seeing significance where there is none.The great Eddington was much taken with the fact, that the Fine Structure Constant of physics (a dimensionless number, of course, otherwise its numerical value would be arbitrary) is very very close to 1/137 (or whatever the figure was).  Odd he should have noticed, this, actually; did he carry around reciprocals of all the integers in his head?  Anyhow, he hypothesized that the FSC was exactly 1/137; and busied himself attempting to explain the discrepancy as measured.  Well, it turned out to be mere gematria.  The FSC is not the reciprocal of an integer, and there’s an end to it.

The smaller the integer, the more it is likely to play a role in disparate structures essentially by happenstance.  Two is the king of them all – duality, binarism – and thus is indeed a very significant number, but rather in the way that water is a significant compound – you don’t get goosebumps when you discover another example.   Much more troubling are huge numbers, such as the ratio of the strength of the Coulomb force to that of gravity – how do you construct a cosmos out of such ill-matched yoke-mates?   Or, to take a recent example from mathematics, consider such apparently unrelated fields as the study of j-functions, and that of finite simple groups.  The first nontrivial factor in one of the series of the former is 196,884; the smallest number of dimensions in which the largest of the latter can operate, is 196,883.   A connection, or close but no cigar? 

~

Foot-note (tail-note, butt-note) anent the Dark Prince.

Two of my favorite Christian authors, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis,  offer antithetical depictions of the Devil.  Chesterton’s is more romantic and medieval:

Roses are redder  when you believe in the Devil.

Lewis’s, by contrast, in the Silent Planet trilogy, Screwtape and The Great Divorce, depicts what we might call the Trivial Devil (though no less dangerous for all that).  There is no romance to him; there is, we may say, Nothing to Recommend Him.  He is no Satanic Majesty, but more like a Satanic Misery,  a Satanic Minionism -- a Mere Mechanism.  And as a mechanism, he is given to chitter-chattery repe(titi)tition.

An example of what we could term a “diabolical” coincidence, in this Lewisian sense,  occurs in “The Matrix”, when a black cat (Satan in miniature, as it might be) passes, right to left, outside the doorway, and then, right after that, or sort of seguing into it, a -- a black cat passes, right to left, outside the doorway.   Neo remarks on the coincidence, merely curious, but his more seasoned team-mates are instantly more knowing and alarmed, for they recognize a revealing glitch in the diabolical master-program and runs the Matrix.   The faults and behaviors of the dark lords who run the place, are eminently mechanical, since they are, in fact, machines.

Leading Questions

We earlier analyzed, and fulminated against, self-posed phony questions; handing out “Greatness” kudos to banal questions (and then dodging them); and the crypto-injunctive “Thank you for…” gambit. 

Thinking along those lines, I noticed something similar on this morning’s “Weekend Edition” on NPR, concerning a recent appropriation bill for the pandemic:

   Some of that is earmarked for testing -- yes?

The questioner was Scott Simon, and the question was posed to an area-expert on the ground, as one of a list of items to be got through.   It came across as time-saving and businesslike, but strictly speaking, as opposed to a neutral “Is some of that earmarked for testing?”, it is what is eristically called a leading question.   That technical term does not mean “a burning question” (nor, for that matter, a “great question”), but refers to the judicially deprecated practice of leading the witness.

* Structurally, considered as an illocution, Simon’s utterance is roughly the dual of the “Rumsfeld ploy”. 

In Rumsfeld, what is in essence a statement  is separated into two clauses:  an initial clause containing the actual content, and phrased as an interrogative; followed by a very brief clause, phrased as a declarative (and addressing the question).  

In the Scott Simon gambit, what is in essence a question  is separated into two clauses:  an initial contentful clause framed as a declarative; followed by a very brief clause, phrased as an interrogative.

*  Rhetorically, considered from a perlocutionary standpoint, the move resembles the “Thank you for…” in that it cogs the dice to elicit a desired behaviour (compliance or assent).

On a scale from most neutral, to most bullying of the witness, we note:

*  Did you take the money?

*  Didn’t you take the money?

*  You took the money -- yes?

*  You took the money, didn’t you?  (with an interrogative up-tone on the final clause)

*  You took the money, didn’t you (with flat declarative intonation on the final clause).   And, on a strengthened prosecutorial note:

* You took the money, now didn’t you.

There are side-subtleties, which we shall ignore, except to contrast

   * You took the money, didn’t you?  (Assumes that you did, and purports not to expect you to dare deny it.

  * (Oh, so) you took the money, did you?  (Affects surprise at a suggestion that you did.)

The latter contrasting pair recall the Latin interrogative particles   nonne (expecting a positive answer) and num (expecting a negative).

Do we thank you for not saying “Great question!”? We do

We earlier examined two rhetorical excrescences which, in their original use, typically involved an act of bad faith on the part of the speaker.

    https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/01/great-question.html

Namely:

(1) The Rumsfieldian maneuver of answering one’s own question.  This purports to cater to the listener, in that it (a) breaks down a statement into two parts, allowing the hearer to absorb the idea more gradually;  (b) purports to be helpful and forthcoming, in answering questions (of which there are typically several in a row).  The move is phony, since it enables the rhetorician to answer only his own self-selected, opportunistically worded  questions.

(2) The commendation “Great question!”, with which a politician or other rhetorician  crowns a genuine (and typically banal) question, posed by a member of the general public.   Phony because, not only does it embody emotional pandering, but quite often serves as a slight-of-tongue to distract the attention of the audience from the fact that the speaker goes on to dodge the actual question, and segue to something else.

An earlier-attested and familiar -- and much-maligned -- rhetorical move, is made on public signs:

(3) “Thank you for not smoking”.   Factually phony because, being a standing statement, it is of course made in ignorance of whether you have actually refrained from smoking;  emotionally phony because a straightforward injunction “No smoking” or “Do not smoke”, or a polite variant “Please refrain from smoking”, is replaced by a formal expression of gratitude, as if from someone whose heart is perennially filled with that amiable emotion, whereas it evinces really a kind of cowardice.

What all three ploys have in common  is empty flattery of the audience by an authority not wishing to appear to be one.

The maneuver also is used currently in French.  As, an actual e-mail from a French company:

Cet e-mail est généré automatiquement.  Merci de ne pas y répondre. Il ne sera pas traité.

Formerly, and appropriately, the phrase used was Prière de …  .   Note by the way that the example above is modally incoherent:  first it acts as though you have not responded and will not do so; then it says that your reply will be ignored.

They’re Coming 4 U

The latest viral paranoia to arise in the globe’s social-media petri-dish, is the

5G Coronavirus Conspiracy !!

So far, the epicenter of this new infection is the UK and Western Europe, but no doubt it will reach our shores in time, just as the Wuhan virus did.  In the meantime, to limber up your mental faculties, read up on this earlier conspiracy,

The Vatican goes after the Lone Star State !

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/05/jade-helm-eyeball-zombies-overrunning.html

This craftly plot was first outed nearly a century ago.  As:

The plans of the Pope for the conquest of the planet  were not known in detail, except in some specially well-informed wooden villages of the Middle West;  but instant precautions were taken to prevent the celebrated Papal Galleys, rowed by thousands of slaves, from penetrating as far as Omaha or Kansas City.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (1930)

Y.M. on linguistic "playfulness"

On the subject of “Deviations from l’arbitraire du signe”:

There arises the possibility of elevating playfulness to the same kind of pedestal  as economy and clarity, particularly on the strength of linguistic developments where emotional coloration has been achieved  at the expense of economy, or clarity, or both.

-- Yakov Malkiel, “The Inflectional Paradigm”, in W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, Directions for Historical Linguistics (1968), p. 32

[For the full essay, to which this is an update, see:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/04/die-frohliche-wissenschaft-lo-gai-saber.html ]

Locked Room Mystery (redivivus ter)

The caterpillar   with shrivelled skin

in a tent of silk    was laid therein.

This crumpled thing,   shrunk like a shroud,

was laid in silk   white as a cloud.

The sons of men   stood round about

warding the worm   should not get out.

Three days they stood   with solemn face,

never eyes wavering   from that place.

Then did they open   that mute cocoon,

and stood amazed:   the worm was gone !

Then some believed   and some did doubt

how that the worm   could have got out.

Yet to the sky   in spiral rings

the new flew forth   on crystal wings.

~

[ For a tale of Paschal miracle:
Murphy Makes a Mitzvah ]

.

Testimony from a Shabbos goy

A Depression-era reminiscence of a working-class Gentile growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan:

There was also some Jewish fellows who I made a few dollars from.  I’d be standin’ around on one of the holidays  and the Jewish man would say, “Come up and light my fire.  I’ll give you a nickel.”  So, great, I’d go up the stairs, but I never could understand the whole concept of the Jewish holidays  where somebody would stand right next to you and you would light it for them, but who was gonna question them? I nickel here and a dime there -- that was big money.

-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 575

[For the full essay to which this is an update, see

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/08/phrase-for-sabbath-shabbos-goy-updated.html ]

Annals of Greatness

We earlier dissected the “Great question!” gambit, as wittingly practiced by politicians:

   https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/01/great-question.html

Since that time, that stereotyped response, being after all cordial, has spread into general use, as simply a polite and friendly, pro-forma and virtally unnoticed, contribution to the lubrication of a dialogue.

And now, during the pandemic, while the global situation is dire, it is also extra challenging for reporters.   Almost every event and issue beyond Topic A has evaporated from the landscape.   So a journalist is hard-pressed to come up with substantive questions that are new or surprising;  naturally, they must run to the hackneyed.   And yet the “Great question!” response has been flourishing like never before.  Here are some examples, from radio interviews (mostly NPR or BBC), of questions thus coronated for greatness:

* So, how has this all affected you and your family?

* Have you ever seen anything like it before?

* Did you ever expect to see anything like this?

* How long do you think this thing’ll go on, or is it too early to tell?
[Note: Question posed to a cab-driver, not an epidemiologist.]

* As a mail-carrier (/ short-order cook /acrobat / circus clown/…), you must feel particularly hard-hit by all this, am I right?

All of them great, great questions!

Appendix:  Here, by way of contrast, is a contentful question, sensibly commended;  significantly  the communication  is written, not oral:

There have been no cases of COVID-19 associated with ingestion of food, but the question is well-founded. COVID-19 is, after all, caused by a virus which enters the body through the nose or mouth.

-- https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-04-24/does-cooking-food-kill-coronavirus

Rarefied Repartee

James Gould Cozzens is an author whose prose you can chew for grist and pith.  He is of a conservative, Protestant disposition;  he has an especial affinity for Law, and not a little for Latin.   Witness this, from his semi-autobiographical first novel, depicting himself as “Francis”, a rather callow young American, moving somewhat aimlessly around the watering-holes of Europe, as tutor to the adolescent child of a wealthy mother:

[One Mr McKellar speaking, of a headstrong young woman] :
“It will be like trtying to get Lorna home from the Casino when she knows that next time it just has to be pair et rouge.  You don’t arise from the table gracefully.  No one does.  Lucretius was an ass.  What does he say?  Well, now I have forgotten.”

“Cur non ut plenus vitae conviva recedis,” Francis said distinctly -- almost viciously, for he felt entitled to one triumph, and what a wretched one this was! “Aequo animoque capis securam, stulte, quietem.”

“Bravo!” Mr McKella said, startled.  He swept a bow to Francis.  “… Plenus, indeed!  You can always use a little more.”

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch. 5

What is really arch about that exchange  is not so much the having of an apposite quotation from De rerum natura  at one’s fingertips, but rather that “Lucretius is an ass”.  All McKellar has done is to mention Lorna’s likely reluctance to leave the gaming-table, yet in the very next instant he presumes that such a situation, drawn from life, will instantly put the hearer -- or anyone of competence -- in mind of one particular a-propos zinger from a a Roman poet of the first century B.C., and that we -- you and I -- are so familiar, and overfamiliar, with the various bons mots of that man, that we can (using schoolboy phraseology) dismiss the old scribbler as “an ass”.

Suum cuique

Concerning the Corpus Christi plays, which began in the thirteenth century:

The different scenes, whenever possible, were distributed in such a way  as to bear some relation to the occuption of the craft that performed it:  e.g. the task of producing Noah’s ark  was entrusted to the boat-builders, the adoration of the magi  to the goldsmiths.

-- Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. V: The Drama to 1642, Part One (1910), p. 45

Such nicety of fitness rests upon a folk notion of appropriateness, almost common sense, rather than being specially religious.  And indeed, we meet this meme in a quite plebeian guise, in one boy’s life, back in Eisenhower’s America:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/04/de-patre.html

“Refutation” inflation (re-updated)

[The present note is an exercise in logic and linguistic hygiene.  It is not political per se, and in particular is agnostic as to the facts and merits of the tangled case under discussion.]

[Original post-date 16 May 2017]
One of the top stories in today’s crowded news:

The family of slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich rejected Fox News reports that he had leaked work e-mails to WikiLeaks before he was fatally shot last year in the District.

The reports, which gained traction on social media, said an FBI forensics examination showed Rich transferred 44,053 DNC e-mails and 17,761 attachments to a now-deceased WikiLeaks director.

Rich’s parents, Joel and Mary Ann, said Tuesday through a spokesman that they do not believe their son gave any information to WikiLeaks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/family-of-slain-seth-rich-says-reports-he-fed-wikileaks-dnc-info-are-untrue/2017/05/16/9b32ef9c-3a46-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html?utm_term=.f0f43ca07a0f

That is admirably and neutrally stated.  However, some news sources are reporting the same facts with headlines like “Seth Rich Parents Refute New Claims On Wikileaks Contact”.   Therein lies a confusion.

To refute is (in its original, non-catachrestic sense) to disprove.  The allegations in question are perfectly precise and emprical, subject to either (partial) refutation or (partial) confirmation.

But the only party in a position to refute the allegations is someone who professionally and forensically examined the laptop in question.    Does it contain such material, or does it not?  The family is in no position to “refute” the allegation, however false it may be.  Indeed, on the Post account, they cannot really be said even to have denied the allegations;  they simply said they don’t believe them.  A perfectly rational stance; but not exactly a denial (for after all, how would they know -- if their son had been secretly betraying his employer, why would he inform his family?), and certainly not a refutation.

Increasingly, the less careful media uses refute where deny would be appropriate.  Part of this may be simple semantic weakness on the journalists’ part (to which many other technical terms, like impeach, are subject), but partly also to the fact that deny has accumulated invidious connotations, as though anyone who “denies” X  is himself shady in some way.   That is a legitimate worry;  other synonyms are available (the family discounted/pooh-poohed/scoffed at/… the allegations) which lack such connotations.  Better to use these than to induce a crucial ambiguity in the verb refute, in a way that renders it inapt for precise usage.

Part of the problem in the fluidity of use of refute  might be  not political, but cognitive and linguistic:  confusion with the paronym rebut.  A rebuttal is not quite as decisive as a refutation, but supposed to be more evidential and structured than a mere denial.  Mere denial is a weak defense indeed, available even to the ghosts of five-year-olds, as in the comic strip "The Family Circus".

A further semantic distinction:  re discussions within the first Nixon administration, of Kevin Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority:

Phillips had not been refuted by the West Wing,  but his thesis had been rejected.
--  Patrick Buchanan,  Nixon’s White House Wars (2017), p. 146

Note:  There are other ways of disposing of an allegation, other than outright refutation:  you may undermine, or infirm, or discredit it, in various ways.   Thus, if a witness presenting himself as Dr. Smith (M.D. Harvard) testifies that the deceased died of psoriasis, another doctor (or team thereof) might refute that testimony (on its own ground) by presenting evidence that the deceased had a huge malignant brain tumor but had never had a skin condition.  But anyone -- say, a lowly clerk at Harvard Medical School -- could discredit the testimony on entirely other grounds, by showing that Smith never attended Harvard Medical School, nor (with a bit of extra digging) ever so much as finished high school.  That would be devastating counter-evidence, but not a “refutation” in the technical sense.  (Logically, Smith might nonetheless have blundered upon the correct explanation of the demise.)

One can’t help suspecting that the media’s terminological laxity might be connected to an epistemological weakness:  presenting counter-allegations as evidentially telling (whether or not they are actually awarded the accolade “refutation”) although (consider the source) they are suspect or undermined at the outset, as coming from the accused's family, or attorney, or partner in crime.  Some of these are treated with great journalistic reverence, and actually pass into folklore  --  "he didn't do nuttin' " (spoken while the perp is actually in flagrante), or, post-hoc, “he didn’t have a gun” (though one was found in his possession, surrounded by spent cartridges), and where all else fails and guilt is  ... irrefutable, “he was hoping to go to college”, “he was starting to turn his life around”.

[Update 17 August 2017]  Bringing it back to Wikileaks:

Assange once told me that he did not “accept” the allegation that Russia had provided him e-mails through a third party,  which of course was different from saying that the allegation was untrue.

-- Raffi Khatchadourian, in 21 Aug 2017 The New Yorker]

But nor did he make any move to refute or cast doubt on the allegation:

I asked if he was even able to know the chain of custody of his election material before it came to him.  He declined to answer.

[Side-note:  for that phrase of forensic science chain of custody,  cf. the term of hadith stemmatology,  isnâd.]

~

A particularly piquant use of the term “refutation” occurs in the mathematical polylogue by Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (1976).  The title impishly echoes that of Karl Popper’s better-known Conjectures and Refutations (1962).  But whereas that title reflected the expection rough-and-tumble of normal science, Lakotos’ phrase produces a double-take:  if a “proof” gets “refuted”, it wasn’t really a proof to begin with, but only a purported proof.  But Lakatos is not referring to those (relatively rare) instances of purported proofs that turned out to be fatally flawed, and left no progeny in mathematics.  Rather, he considers mathematical demonstrations that were all right so far as they went, but which contained hidden assumptions.  These being unearthed in a “refutation”, the original proof, or something much like it, gets deepened, until further unsuspected subtleties become revealed.    He offers a dialectic analysis of the process of mathematizing.   The result does not demote mathematical truth to a mere just-so story, as among nihilists and relativists.  It rather offers a more epistemologically modest picture of the mathematical enterprise (the fallible human excavation of a transcendental reality, a Platonist would say), in which the notions of “proof” and “refutation” both get toned down a bit, and the process becomes a bit more like developing a software package, finding and fixing bugs along the way.  The result is real progress.

For a more technical discussion of refutation and its semantic field, try

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/01/refutation-vs-disconfirmation.html

~

The flip side of the coin, by which the media use artificially strengthened language when presenting the allegations of the victim class and their attorneys, is artificial down-grading when the allegations come from the authorities.   As, a headline from a moment ago:

South San Francisco police officers on Wednesday morning shot and killed a man who they say was allegedly armed with a shotgun.

Either “they say” or “allegedly” would be an adequate and appropriate editorial distancing from the official police statement.   Together, they are at best redundant, or, if taken literally, false:  the police did not state “He was allegedly armed with a shotgun”;  such a statement would be in place if, say, the police had not actually seen the shotgun, but a bystander reported -- alleged -- such possession of a shotgun (which had  been abstracted from the crime scene by the time the police arrived).  

~

[Addendum] Further vocabulary.

In the following sophisticated example, the verb nullify is used, not in the sense ‘refute’ exactly, but ‘to render null and void’

-- not to prove the falsity of a statement, but to disable its presuppositions:

I turn now to the objection that, even if probability-scepticism does not nullify the concept of truth, it does nullify the idea that science should aspire after truth.

-- John Watkins, Science and Scepticism (1984), p. 162

Indeed, Lakotos’ impish use of refute is roughly the same idea.

~

A bonus from Classical Antiquity:

Pericles, also, was a hearer of Zeno, the Eleatic, who treated of natural philosophy  ion the same manner as Parmenides did, but had also perfected himself in an art of his own, for refuting and silencing  opponents in argument;  as Timon of Phlius describes it --

Also the two-edgted tongue  of mighty Zeno, who,

say what one would, could argue it untrue.

-- Plutarch’s Lives (Dryden’s translation)

Suzanne! Suzanne!

We loved each other

   tenderly,

and our fondness encreased

  with age.

-- Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield  (1766)

For Whom the Bell Tollens

Miscellaneous additions to our essay on the logic and rhetoric of modus tollens,

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/12/modus-tollens-tollendus-est-iterum-re.html

(1) Psychological observations

People seldom intuit what is unpalatable to them.  [Moreover, one can] eliminate any undesirable indirect implication of their special insight  by means of an additional hilfs-intuition, liquidating the embassassing logical relation.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974), p. 95

In short, one ‘answers’ the sceptic  by striding across logical gaps  to conclusions inconsistent with premises that one does not contest.

-- John Watkins, Science and Scepticism (1984), p. 34

(2) The reductio ad absurdum /”self-mate” gambit:

The traditional argument for the primacy of acceleration-retardation  rests on the absurdity of denying it.

-- Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977), p. 216

Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures, which is regarded by some as a foundation-stone for this kind of activity, has been described by no less an authority than Roman Jakobson  as an argumentum a contrario (Jakobson, 1959), showing the impossibility of the whole enterprise.

-- Hilary Putnam, “Some Issues in the Theory of Grammar”, in  Mind, Language, and Reality (1975), p. 85