Sheesh buddy - you could whine at an Olympic level.
Wow mate, you sure are a gasbag. A rambling blowhard
That is just a particularly childish ad hominem attack. Why not respond with a reasoned argument instead of the schoolyard taunts?
Hm.
Ignoring this blatant hypocrisy, let's start with these "simple concepts" you misuse:
When a person mistakes a guess drawn from abductive reasoning for an actual firm conclusion as you are doing - that is a fallacy called 'affirming the consequent'.
This is a decent enough simple explanation of the fallacy. However, as you subsequently misuse it and fail to realize how your explication of it defeats your entire argument, it's worth going over in somewhat greater detail. I'll restrict myself to sources for amateurs:
"To those who confuse hopelessly the order of horses and carts, affirming the consequent is a fallacy which comes naturally...In an 'if... then' construction, the 'if part is the antecedent, and the 'then' part is the consequent. It is all right to affirm the antecedent in order to prove the consequent, but not vice versa.
If I drop an egg, it breaks. I dropped the egg, so it broke.
(This is perfectly valid. It is an argument called the
modus ponens which we probably use every day of our lives. Compare it with the following version.)
If I drop an egg, it breaks. This egg is broken, so I must have dropped
This is the fallacy of affirming the consequent...Affirming the consequent is fallacious because an event can be produced by different causes"
Pirie, M. (2006).
How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic. Continuum.
The fallacy is very much related to equating correlation with causation and inferring from "if x then y" that "if y then x". Importantly, while it is absolutely not true that "if x then y" entails "if y then x", it does entail that "if y then x" is necessarily more likely. To illustrate, consider the following:
1) All Romanists (a type of classical historian) are historians
2) X is an historian.
~ 3) Therefore, X is a Romanist
This is an example of the type of fallacy you mentioned. What is essential to understand is that it is fallacious in the classical (and formal) sense, not a reasoning failure
per se. While there are plenty of historians who are not Romanists, the ratio of Romanists to historians is far greater than people to historians. Put another way, consider a probability space of all persons. The region which represents all historians is a tiny fraction of the total space. However, the region of Romanists is not only entirely contained within the space of historians, but is relatively very large compared to the tiny space occupied by all historians within the space of all persons.
This is why abductive reasoning is vital to the sciences and elsewhere in academia (and in life) :
"The general purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the field of abduction...we motivate our study via several examples that show that this type of reasoning pervades common sense reasoning as well as scientific inquiry."
Aliseda, A. (2006).
Abductive Reasoning: Logical Investigations into Discovery and Explanation (
Synthese Library, Vol. 330). Springer.
"Abduction, or inference to the best explanation, is a form of inference that goes from data describing something to a hypothesis that best explains or accounts for the data. Thus abduction is a kind of theory-forming or interpretive inference."
from the intro to Josephson & Josephson (1996).
Abductive Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology. Cambridge University Press.
Now let's examine how you misrepresented historical methods, logic, and fallacies:
Historians catalogue and interpret the data, the historicity of Jesus (or any other character) is what is called an 'inference to the best explanation'', which is a guess, a tentative conclusion of what that particular researcher believes to be the most likely explanation.
1) Necessarily, this describes all historiography and therefore couldn't matter less when it comes to Jesus. If this is what historians do, then it is what historians always do and your argument is amounts to a criticism of the entirety of historical study.
2) "Inference to the best explanation" is the central component of all research in every field from Indo-European linguistics to particle physics. To the extent deductive reasoning is applicable outside of formal systems, it is necessarily limited as it relies on "axioms" that are based upon AND used as the foundations for perceptual and cognitive frameworks.
This is called ABDUCTIVE REASONING, and it gives only a best guess, not an actual conclusion or proof.
3) Ignoring the ridiculous claim that "conclusions" are somehow strictly defined by inference rules, it couldn't matter less if such reasoning isn't "proof". Proof is almost entirely limited to mathematics. It is colloquially used to mean something like "very likely true", but as any such definition is subjective, fuzzy, and useless for scholars we not only recognize that research isn't about proving anything but also recognize the vital importance of probabilistic reasoning and inductive (as well as abductive) reasoning.
When a person mistakes a guess drawn from abductive reasoning for an actual firm conclusion as you are doing
4) Here again you confuse "guess" with abductive reasoning. All inferences can be baseless, deductive or not. In general, people who haven't received some education or haven't studied logic make fairly consistent errors when it comes to formal (logical) inference. Good researchers (including historians), rely on non-deductive reasoning and methods have been developed for centuries in order to support conclusions that do not require axiomatic systems (or proof) in order to reach sound, supported conclusions. Recent years have paired abduction with computational theory, cognitive science, the philosophy of logic, and more.
You, however, seem stuck on an incredibly shallow understanding of logical inference, its place in research, the nature of both fallacies and formal reasoning, and why your criticisms are
prima facie nonsensical. Either historians rely on a method you claim can yield only guesses, in which case all historical research is subject to the same flaw, or there is something about historical Jesus studies that makes this field different, in which case the only support you have offered is your claims about what evidence historians have without citing any historians or historical research and failing to address those I have.
stop posting long lists of utterly irrelevant references.
Have you read them? If not, how do you know they are irrelevant? You have repeatedly requested I check out a few online pages and ignored both my quotations from and citations of actual scholarship. Then you assert these are irrelevant? Curious.
You keep demanding that I support claims I have not made and positions I do not jold.
abductive reasoning does NOT provide a conclusion. To imagine it does is fallacious.
This is wrong.
Now that is just nonsense - there is a far greater body of evidence for many other historical figures, at the very least for every single historical figure that unlike Jesus we have contemporary evidence for.
This is misleading, as I meant historical figures from ancient history, but also simply wrong as we have contemporaneous sources for Jesus.
there is barely a shred of evidence for the life of Jesus.
This is fantastically wrong.
You've made some very clear and clearly incorrect statements. What exactly am I not understanding about your argument(s)?
Clearly you do not in fact know what inferences to the best evidence and abducitve thinking mean
Abductive reasoning is not like other forms of logical argumentation
"A hundred years ago, Charles Sanders Peirce [1931-1958] coined the concept of abduction in order to illustrate that the process of scientific discovery is not irrational and that a methodology of discovery is possible. Peirce interpreted abduction essentially as an inferential creative process of generating a new explanatory hypothesis....Abduction is the process of inferring certain facts and/or laws and hypotheses that render some sentences plausible, that explain (and also sometimes discover) some (eventually new) phenomenon or observation; it is the process of reasoning in which explanatory hypotheses are formed and evaluated."
Magnani, L. (2009).
Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (
Cognitive Systems Monographs, Vol. 3).
I eagerly await how you will ignore, twist, and otherwise evade admission that despite your faith in your understanding of Wikipedia pages, your understanding of inference and formal reasoning in research in general and historical Jesus research in particular is simply without support, as is your understanding of our evidence for Jesus' historicity.