[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:
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
-- 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
~
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)
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