Risen indeed

 

An Egyptian-American Muslim colleague of mine  received an e-mail from his Egyptian-American Coptic friend, addressed to a roster of friends and acquaintances both Christian and Muslim.   The message read, in its entirety:

Have a blessed Easter.

Risen indeed.

Now, my colleague occasionally has difficulties with nuances of English, even after a couple of decades of residence in the U.S.   But he did understand that this terse and telegraphic phrase asserted the Resurrection of Jesus.

Though Muslim to the core, he is quite accepting of the other Abrahamic faiths (indeed, has more than once attended services with Christian friends), and he was happy to receive this blessing from a friend.   He then asked me, in confidence (since he knows that I am candid about such things), whether all Christian denominations believed in the Resurrection.

            “Um … yes,” I replied.   (The “Um” part was to stall for time while the taken-aback-sensation passed.  In a similar fashion, some years ago, a young woman colleague, university-educated and soon to be well traveled, asked me out of the blue, “Do Jews believe that Jesus is the Messiah?”   -- “Um … no,” was my reply.)

His own reply was a surprise.  “Then we believe the same thing!” he exclaimed, beaming.   For the Koran (he went on) proclaimed that God “lifted” Jesus up to Paradise (rafa`a).   I expressed satisfaction at this congruence, and privately desired that the message might spread to outfits like ISIL and Boko Haram, who might, please, accordingly  knock it off.

He went on to inform me that (according to Muslims) Jesus of Nazareth (upon whom be peace) had not actually been crucified.   I had heard this motif before in connection with the Ahmadiyya (a pure simulacrum had been crucified in his place); but my colleague added a neat twist, reminiscent of the trope wherein the executioner hoists with his own petard:   God had caused the very soldier leading Jesus to Golgotha  to suddenly take on the mild carpenter’s appearance.  

“That’s not in the Koran,” I frowned.  -- “No,” he conceded.

“Hadith?”  (There are tens of thousands of these, some sounder than others, you never known what might be found in some of the doubtful ones.)  --  He considered.  “In the culture,” he finally said.

Which is to say:  Folklore, like “December 25”.   (None but the most ignorant Christian will take offense if you state that we really have no idea what day Jesus was born on.)

Well -- He is born, and He is risen.  Peace on Earth, good will to men.

A vision common to Christianity and Islam

(Nur mit ein bißchen anderen Worten)

~

[Philological footnote]  The Arabic, rafa`, is literally ‘raised’.   Thus, it is not quite equivalent to resurrexit, in what might elsewhere be a small  but is here a crucial difference:  rafa` is comptabile with Jesus having been raised to Paradise while still alive, like Elijah.  There is nothing in the Koran saying that he was risen from the dead.

~

With our linguistic caps on, let us look more closely at the wording of that greeting.   To a Muslim with an uncertain grasp of English, it might seem no more than you might find on a Hallmark card.   It is thus the perfect two-tier or encapsulated expression:   no more than a smooth rock, or black box, to the uninitiated;  but a treasure-chest  which springs open at the click, to initiates.

The standard American greetings that those of my generation grew up with  were “Happy Easter” and “Merry Christmas”.   But as those holdays became increasingly commercialized, some observent Christians have come increasingly to say “Blessed Easter” or “Easter Blessings”, to make it plain that they are actually referring to the holy-day and not simply a time to hunt eggs or find discounts at the Mall (or as a counterpunch to the latterday degradation of even “Merry Christmas” to “Season’s Greetings”).  You would not say it to someone you knew to be an atheist;  though you might say it to a kindly stranger.

 

“Risen indeed”, by contrast, is not used  even by the generality of Christians, let alone to those of other faiths or none.  It specifically echoes the antiphonal style of worship, priest and congregation:      

    

   “The Lord be with you” 

   Rx: “And also with you.”   

   “Christ is risen.” 

   Rx: “He is risen indeed.”    

 

And by leaving off the first two words of the latter formula, pronoun and auxiliary verb, the writer made it clear that he was echoing the ritual greeting, which you may hear in Orthodox, Catholic and Episcopal services, but not among churches whose liturgy or worship-style is not antiphonal.

Among the Eastern Orthodox, this formula is known as the Paschal troparion:   Χριστὸς ἀνέστη.

The English Wikipedia has a particlarly nice article on this topic, as does the Russian version:

       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paschal_greeting

Christus resurrexit! Resurrexit vere!

[Update]  The whole offering-and-response style recalls, actually, Arabic.  There are dozens or scores, if not hundreds, of formulaic greetings and blessings, each with a prescribed response.   This scarcely exists in English, apart from “Thank you” -- “You’re welcome”.  (Arabic:  shukran. -- `afwan.)

Thus:  To al-salaam `aleykum, you reply Wa-`alaykum al-salaam.  (“Hello.” -- “Hello back.”)

To SabaaH al-xayr (“Good morning”), SabaaH al-nuur (literally “Morning of light”;  with many further variants.)

To na`iiman! (a salutation to someone who has evidently just bathed, or shaved, or had a haircut):  Allah yin`im `ayleek.

And so on.

There is thus, both a theological aspect to the responsory mode of worship, and a cultural/aesthetic one:  both typical of the Mideast.

[Further update]  Apart from the context of worship, such ritualized exchanges are typical of traditional societies, and indeed help constitute their social cement.   Contemporary American is sadly lacking in these:  a lonely survival is “Thank you” -- “You’re welcome” -- and even this may go the way of the dodo  as the custom of so much as thanking  fades, along with that relic of our mother’s day, the Thank-You Note.

(As, https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2025/08/26/carolyn-hax-cash-gifts-thank-you-notes/

Nieces prefer getting cash gifts and not sending thank-you notes.   Sending cash feels like paying bills  to this aunt, and nieces’ lack of response to gifts  makes it even worse.)

 

But the forefathers of our ancestors in the northern isles, were replete with these.   A fossil of one survives in the mysterious word wassail, now known to most speakers only in some old Christmas carols.  In origin, it is a salutation; grammatically, an imperative.  And it came with its own antiphon:

 

Host:  Wassail!  [cognate with Old Norse ves heill ‘be hale’, as in “hale and hearty” and “to your health”]

Guest:  Drink-hail!

 

Ah, the days, those were the days;  those were the days  indeed.

 

Informative tautologies (updated)

Technically, for a logician, or a semanticist of the Snow-is-White school, tautologies convey no information;  but to linguists and pragmaticians, in context they often do.  In fact, we may state that they usually do, since otherwise why utter them?  “Business is business” is flint-hearted;  “Boys will be boys”, tenderly exculpatory.

The opposite of an utterance that pretends to contain no information (and thus, in particular, to be inexpugnable) but actually does (and often of a trenchant sort), is a definition that, ex cathedra, is all about informing, but which melts to the touch.  Cf. our essay here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/01/pugnaciously-vacuous-definitions_24.html

~

Covertly vacuous uses of technical-sounding terms  have been scouted in histories of science.  As, “Things fall because of gravity, and rise because of levity.” Or Molière’s virtus dormitiva.  But more may be packed into such terms than may be initially apparent.  As, one philosopher pointed out that “The ball rebounded to the height that it did  because of its resiliency.”  But this is informative:  the height is owing to internal characteristics of that ball, rather than from the ball’s having been dropped from a greater height, or having been dropped on a more resilient surface.

Additionally, the initial tautological character of a sentence can  so to speak  “age off”, in accordance with semantic evolution of its terms. Thus, “Atoms are indivisible” was initially as circular as “Bachelors are unmarried”, since they were defined from the outset as indivisibilia (as their name, a-tom, etymologically implies).  But on its current interpretation, the sentence would qualify as false.

A mathematician looks at Newton’s Definition 1, in the Principia:

Quantity of matter is a measure of matter that arises from its density and volume jointly.

Great acumen is hardly needed to realize that this definition is hopelessly circular, since density is normally defined as the ration of mass to volume;  but Newton’s unhelpful phrase  does have some implicit implications.  For example, we expect the mass of an object to remain unchanged if we change its shape.

-- Michael Spivak, Physics for Mathematicians: Mechanics I (2010), p. 9

~

A 2015  example of the uses of tautology:

Robert Buissière on Médi1, re Presidential candidates:

Jeb Bush, frère de son frère,

et Hillary Clinton,  épouse de son époux.

As they stand, these statements are “analytic”; but we understand the import:  Jeb and Hillary got where they are today, largely owing to family association.

Cf. & contrast the common expression “He is his father’s son.”  Normally this means that he takes after his Dad, and not that he is getting any special favors from other people owing to that filiation.  To imply the latter, you might say “Daddy’s little boy” or something.  By contrast, the French phrases in the above context  do not imply that Jeb’s politics are a close match to Dubya’s, let alone that Hillary’s are a close match to Bill’s.

~

A bare tautology like “Business is business”, as a free-standing statement, invites contentful interpretation via a “Gricean implicature” (specifically, the Maxim of Quantity).   The following is a syntactically more complex case, there the tautology is embedded in a subordinate clause:

Ever since self was self, nature been keepin’ folks off of red-hot stoves.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

The meaning is:  Common sense has been extant  from time immemorial.  Operationally, the (tongue-in-cheek) interpretation is:  Go back and back in time, sampling as you go. For each sample-point, verify whether  “self = self” holds at that time; and if so, then evaluate “Common Sense is in effect? Y/N”.  The sentence, for all its folksiness, has a kind of philosophy-class spin to it; the moreso as “self = self” calls up First-Order Logic with Identity.

~

Stylistic appreciation

Usually there is a summary “That’s that” finality to tautologies, whether used informatively or not;  stylistically, they are bare-bones.  But consider this:

Herod:  The moon has a strange look tonight. … She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman. … Does she not reel like a drunken woman?  She is like a madwoman, is she not?

Herodias:  No;  the moon is like the moon, that is all.

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

Here the barrenness of the pale white, plain round  far-floating body, is reflected in the unyielding tautological formula.

~

Enten-Eller

Philosophers have scribbled  much ink, and later worn out many a typewriter ribbon, and finally expended great bushels of pixels, discoursing upon the status of “logical truths”; such as, paradigmatically, the following:

            (I) Every man is either married or a bachelor.

(We simplify, since the matter is not really of interest; leaving out of account, for instance, the curious case of Schrödinger’s groom.)

It is agreed that such a sentence tells us nothing about the world, unlike that time-honored exemplar of informativeness,

            (II)  The cat is on the mat.

which has been so oft repeated. down the years, that said cat has achieved the immobility and timelessness of an Egyptian idol.  (Presumably the mat lies in a patch of sunlight, so why ever move?)

            And yet its affordances are quite different from those of another statement of the same logical form; say:

            (II) Every number is either even or odd.

For, although the sentence (I) does not perhaps baldly state anything substantive about the world, its presuppositions speak volumes.  For one thing, it gives us to understand that there is a sharply defined institution, Marriage, into which a man may enter or not; and that his resultant state is either-or. Even so much will give our Martian anthropologists  sufficient grist  for many turns of the mill.

~

The above are mostly individual linguistic parlor-tricks.  Much more generally, there is the matter of the status of the equations of mathematics.  A view put forward by the dessicated and ennervating tendency called formalist (nominalist)  maintained that, being mathematical, they are tautologies, and being tautologies, they are uninformative -- semantically vacuous.  Practical experience shows that doctrine to be false.  As a way to see how such equations manage to be informative, consider the number pi.

Pi can be defined, qualitatively, in a number of different ways, most familiarly as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to is diameter.  It  is, moreover, a Given of the invisibilia, woven into the fabric of the noöspheric pattern;  and -- crucially -- it can be reached in a startling variety of precise quantitative ways, along this strand or that of the warp and the woof -- and the woorp and the wahf, along any of the dimensions of the multidimensional mathematical textile.   Pi is itself ever one, the peak of the Golden Mountain;  but the paths that climb to it are numberless.  It can be expressed as a definite integral; as an infinite continued fraction; as an infinite product; as an infinite sum; with many variations of each.  (Behold some of them at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi.)  That fact that any one of these equals π is informative and indeed amazing, for in effect each one constitutes hiking instructions -- a trail-map -- to the summit, each from a wildly different base-camp.  And each one of these infinitely intricate expressions  is equal to any other, in an equation which is as distant from tautological or uninformative as can be imagined.

~

[Update 13 May 2020]  An aborbing article by Evan Osnos, in the 11 May 2020 issue of The New Yorker, maps out the paths by which the Greenwich Connecticut  tennis-and-boating-club crowd  came to support Trump.  The notables of that town have a patrician heritage, in principle at variance with the flashy style of the vulgarian from the Bronx, but as one blue-blood testifies, his conversion came while witnessing an early speech by the candidate:  “He had that line that he would use: ‘Folks, we either have a country or we don’t.’ And I felt the chill .. I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God, this is a really good line.’

Apart from the formally tautological character of that line, it puzzles by its vagueness:  out of context, it is unclear what at all is being hinted at.  Presumably the line is a dog-whistle, a bit of Rorschach rhetoric from which the listener will extract whatever meaning he likes.

The line does nothing for me; but it does recall such successful political antecedents as “The business of America is business.”

~

[Update 14 May 2020] 

Some of you may be familiar with the British sport of trainspotting.  That may or may not be in accordance with current U.K. guidance on coronavirus lockdown.  But here’s a hobby you can practice in the safety and comfort of your own home:

Tautology-Spotting !

As:

Headline in this morning’s New York Times:

The People Behind the Counter Are People

Remember this the next time you order takeout.

That one recalls those sleep-inducing example-sentences from introductory logic class (All brave Athenians are Athenians).  But in this case, it has a punch, and the source of that punch is not logical but lexical.  For, people has a variety of senses;  from the neutrally classificatory

(a)  an instantiation of the species Homo sapiens, near-cousin of Pan troglodytes, sometimes known as “a forked radish”;

to the “pregnant sense”  (I phrase it freely)

(b)  an ensouled being created in the image of the Lord of Hosts, whom Christ died to redeem.

In the cited sentence, the first occurrence of the word people has the (a) meaning; the second occurrence, (b).

For more on perspectival semantics and pregnant senses, check out this essay:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2019/10/words-of-day-sublunary-postlapsarian.html

~

In all the instances above, tautology is used in its traditional logico-philosophical sense.  But technical terms sometimes get picked up by a wider audience, where their use may be lax.  Thus, the literary critic V.S. Pritchett, in his article on the novelist Anthony Powell, wrote:

Mr. Powell is excellent with the raffish…. I think the sententious irony succeeds. … It adds a very English flavor, either of comic tautology or deflation.

The sense of tautology is unclear here.  Perhaps it refers to mechanical repetition, a standard component of broad humor.

When is the Task Force not the Task Force?

In May 2020, with the coronavirus still raging, President Trump said he was ready to “turn the page on all that”, and announced that the covid Task Force that had been led (apparently at the bottom of a mine-shaft somewhere) by the Vice-President (whose name  escapes me at present, and shall continue to do so in future) was being “disbanded”.  (In the French press reports of the anouncement, this verb was rendered démantelé -- ‘dismantled’, which sounds even more alarming.)  That offhand ad-lib caused consternation, so he “re-spoke” himself (verb ©WoDJ 2020, All Rights Reserved).  He now states that the Task Force will continue "indefinitely" -- albeit with substitute members and different mission. -- The young reporter who was obliged to recount all this on NPR, noticed a certain “philosophical question” here, whether this would be the “same” task force or not.

The philosophical problem alluded to  is that of Continuity of Identity, with many ramifications ancient and modern.  We have touched on some examples in these posts:

  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/continuity%20of%20identity

Meanwhile, herewith a handful of miscellaneous quotations, illustrating the variety of concerns:

Simon Blackburn (Think (1999), p. 127) quotes the joke about Irish axe that had been in the family for generations, the head having been replaced three times and the helve six; and asks whether Theseus’ ship, rebuilt plank by plank over the course of the voyage until no original molecule remained, was the “same” ship; and if so, what if someone had saved all the discarded planks and built a replica, this with all the original molecules, was that the “same” ship as well.

.

A modern example, with wry phrasing:

The truck had been a Renault back in the twenties, but had become, over time, a collection of replacement parts  cannibalized from every sort of machine.

-- Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw (2008), p. 146

And with a quite different topology:

The Romans who traversed the plains of Hungary  supposed that they passed several navigable rivers .. but there is reason to suspect that the winding stream of the Theiss  … might present itself in different places  under different names.

-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788)

Of current concern among Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers:

Since these world-lines define the individuals we quantify over when we use modal logic (more accurately, when we ‘quantify into’ modal contexts), we do not have well-defined individuals at our disposal in any realistically quantified modal logic.

-- Jaakko Hintikka, “Quine on Who’s Who”, in Hahn & Schilpp, eds., The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (1986), p. 210

The Quinean position (on the "block universe" picture):

The space-time view helps one appreciate that there is no reason why my first and fifth decades should not, like my head and foot, count as parts of the same man, however dissimilar.  There need be no unchanging kernel  to constitute me the same man  in both decades,  any more than there need be  some peculiarly Quinian textural quality, common to the protoplasm of my head and feet;  though both are possible.

-- W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (1960), p. 171

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.

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

“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  in 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-edged tongue  of mighty Zeno, who,

say what one would, could argue it untrue.

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

Bonnet Blanc vs. Blanc Bonnet

Bonnet Blanc versus Blanc Bonnet

(Or, synonyms, at daggers drawn)

I once wrote an MA thesis called Linguistic Life on the Left, a historical-semantic survey of the Berkeley linguiscape during my time there as a graduate student.  It sifted out correlations between a sect’s self-expression,  and its (sometimes partly subconscious) ideology.  A favorite schematic example  was this  one:

Given that: Groups A, B, and C are all part of what popular or pre-theoretical conception would consider “the Left” (albeit that seeming Big Tent  turns out to be a granfalloon).

And that:  Group A denounces Group C as ‘pigs’, while Group B denounces group C as ‘swine’.

From this we can conclude: virtually nothing about Group C; but that Group A and Group B are bitter enemies, barely sharing any verbiferous ether that could even attempt to pass coherent messages between them.

For: Group A derived the epithet from the rants of the American Black Panthere; Group B derived theirs from the European Marxist polemical tradition (nineteenth century et seq.)  A vast host of incompatible cultural assumptions go with each.  In keeping with the expressive ethos of the two groups, we can call the vituperative practices of A as "badmouthing"; of B  as "the ironical-polemical style".  Both manners, when well done, can afford aesthetic pleasures.

~

And now we have the following situation, in the context of the controversy over illegal immigration.

Entity A described the immigrant-source regions as “shit-holes”.

Entity B described them rather as a ‘snake-pit’.

Once again, these two entities, along with their fanbases, are not on speaking, let alone reasoning terms.

Entity A is POTUS;  Entity B is a Circuit Court of California.  [My source for that was NPR’s All Things Considered; for some reason, a string-search in Google news is not turning up anything relevant.  Thus evanescent are the bubbles that burble from the media.]  From similar observations, A and B draw opposite conclusions.  A: Who would want to bring in people from such areas?  B: Who would be so unconscionable as to send people back to such areas?

There is another linguistic/political parallel between that case and the one described in the previous section.  In either case, one term of the “synonymic antithesis” is more populist in tone (pigs; shithole), the other more literary and traditional (swine; snake-pit).