Uploaded June 2024 | Updated September 2026, 6 days ago
Continuing to talk about arguments from silence in biblical studies today. Too often biblical scholars fail to recognize the randomness of saliency. What one author thinks to record or not record needn't have, and often doesn't have, any heavy explanation. Recognizing that it's often a bad idea to put a high probability on the prediction that *this* person will report *this* thing in *this* document is not at all akin to deciding that our senses are unreliable. It's more like realizing that it's very difficult to predict who will fall in love with whom. Or realizing based on empirical evidence that a particular symptom isn't always found in a particular disease. It's recognizing the actual quality of variability in human decisions to report.
Here again is Tim McGrew's article on arguments from silence in history.
timothymcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/The-Argument-from-Silence-Acta-Analytica-Tim-2013.pdf
Continuing to talk about arguments from silence in biblical studies today. Too often biblical scholars fail to recognize the randomness of saliency. What one author thinks to record or not record needn't have, and often doesn't have, any heavy explanation. Recognizing that it's often a bad idea to put a high probability on the prediction that *this* person will report *this* thing in *this* document is not at all akin to deciding that our senses are unreliable. It's more like realizing that it's very difficult to predict who will fall in love with whom. Or realizing based on empirical evidence that a particular symptom isn't always found in a particular disease. It's recognizing the actual quality of variability in human decisions to report.
Here again is Tim McGrew's article on arguments from silence in history.
timothymcgrew.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/The-Argument-from-Silence-Acta-Analytica-Tim-2013.pdf
