anonym comments on Rationality Quotes - September 2009 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: thomblake 01 September 2009 03:06PM

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Comment author: anonym 02 September 2009 03:52:38AM 1 point [-]

If I only had a dollar for every time somebody misquoted that wonderful quote to me as "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"...

Comment author: thomblake 02 September 2009 01:05:30PM -1 points [-]

Not a misquote, just slightly out of context. And I'm fairly sure Emerson would apply 'foolish' to most sorts of consistency.

Comment author: anonym 02 September 2009 03:37:35PM 2 points [-]

It omits a crucial part of the quote that results in a completely different meaning. Leaving out an adjective that it is integral to the meaning is different than omitting some minor context.

Comment author: thomblake 02 September 2009 03:46:20PM 0 points [-]

That's why I pointed out that leaving out 'foolish' probably doesn't change Emerson's intent at all. Worrying about consistency at all is what he found troublesome - he counseled against trying to be consistent in general, and I take 'foolish' to be more superlative than anything.

Comment author: anonym 03 September 2009 03:23:45AM 0 points [-]

You may be right that it doesn't change the meaning much, in which case it's still a misquote, but a minor one (such as using a synonym of a word instead of the actual word: correct sense, wrong words). What it definitely is not is "just slightly out of context", since that means the utterance is missing context and as a result appears to mean something other than what was intended, which is precisely what you're arguing has not happened.

Comment author: thomblake 03 September 2009 01:41:39PM 0 points [-]

I disagree on both points. It is not a misquote since it is entirely the words Emerson actually wrote, as he wrote them. It is out of context since there are words nearby ("context") that were not included.

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2009 03:09:36AM 1 point [-]

I guess we understand the phrase "out of context" differently then and have to disagree. I would never use it for leaving out a single adjective, and haven't heard it used that way. I have only heard it used when entire clauses or sentences are omitted.

I note that wikipedia seems to agree with my interpretation. From Fallacy of Quoting Out of Context (emphasis mine):

The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.

...

Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as "quoting out of context". The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context (as all quotes are) per se, but to the quoter's decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become "context" by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words.

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