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They may be wrong on this particular matter, but it hardly follows that they "don't deserve our attention". White (of Strunk and White) is the author of Charlotte's Web, still popular after six decades, so, not quite a literary failure.
Sure. Also, if they are driving a car into an intersection I'm crossing, I definitely endorse attending to them. But I suspect the poster Morendil is quoting meant "don't deserve our attention [as authorities on grammatical usage]."
The pervasive wrongness of Strunk and White, in particular, is a recurring theme on LanguageLog.
If we're to be treating people as deserving of our attention on the basis of their literary success, as the author of the quote did (see the appeal to Chaucer et al.), then it becomes relevant that E. B. White wrote Charlotte's web. If we are going to ignore what E. B. White says on matters of usage because it doesn't matter what he did as a writer, then in order to be fully consistent we should ignore Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the rest. This, however, undermines the Language Log quote, because it relies entirely on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the others to make its point.
You seem to be failing to draw the distinction between looking at what they said and looking at what they did. And indeed, Strunk and White did not, in fact, actually follow their own advice.
I simply don't think that this distinction is decisive. After all, on the topic of what physics is, we pay attention to Richard Feynman not only as an example of a physicist. We also pay attention to what he says about what physics is. And we take his statements about physics as having some authority on the strength of his being a physicist.
Fundamentally it seems to come down the expert-at-vs.-expert-on distinction. Being an expert at writing is some evidence for being an expert on it, but if what one says in one's persona is an expert on writing doesn't actually match what you do in your persona as an expert at writing, we have to ask which one is actually accurate. These are people who were initially known as experts at writing, so if there's a contradiction it's quite possibly because they were able to parlay their reputation as one into reputation as the other, without necessarily actually being the other. And if someone is primarily an expert at writing, then looking at what they actually wrote is more important. We do listen to what Feynman says about what physics is, but we expect philosophers of science to have a somewhat better idea.
But all this is hardly relevant. The fact remains that these days we have better experts on writing, whose expertise is actually empirically based. Should the debate become so unclear as to come down to authority rather than arguments, who has the better track record is pretty clear.
Not on principle, but because I have read Feynman, and I have read philosophy of science (plenty of it, in my view), I do not expect philosophers of science to have a better idea - but in my case it's not expectation. It's memory.
Of course, you don't have to pay any attention to what I just wrote. But I think that if you read enough philosophy one thing you will find philosophers agreeing on often is that other philosophers are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, could not be more wrong, disastrously wrong.
I don't. I've read work by prominent philosophers of science and noticed parts that were not even internally coherent. As far as I can see they are off in their own little world divorced from anything useful.
OK, I guess that part was just wrong.
I don't think it's straightforwardly literary success. Chaucer and Shakespeare may be the two most influential writers in English. Their work represents the form of English that 'won' in the 14th century and turn of 1600 respectively. The only other texts that leap to mind as historical sources of similar importance would be the King James Bible and the first Dictionary.
Shakespeare and Chaucer aren't being appealed to as authoritative commentators. Their writing is referred to of evidence of English as it did and does exist.
It is not clear to me what you are saying. On the one hand you are saying that their work is representative of English as it existed. On the other hand you are saying that they are highly influential. Well, which is it?
But either way, E. B. White meets the criteria to at least some extent. First, he is indeed a representative of English as it existed in the mid-20th century. And as such, he is arguably more relevant to us now than Shakespeare and Chaucer are, since his English is closer to ours. Chaucer's work, after all, is sufficiently hard for us to read that there now exist translations into current English of his work, and even Shakespeare cannot be read without a glossary.
As for influential, well, after all, White is one of the authors of Strunk and White's Elements of Style, which is influential. In fact, it is precisely because of the influence of Strunk and White that Language Log is bothering to talk about it.
Both representative and influential. Why would that be a contradiction? Newton and Einstein are both referred to as showing how scientists work AND as influencing scientists after them.
Writers and 'experts' are being mixed up here. White's involvement here is as a commentator and critic, not in his own writing. Shakespeare and Chaucer aren't commentators offering arguments, they're the sort of thing that experts have to be expert in. You can argue whether another commentator's analysis is right or wrong, but it's more difficult to reject the evidence of cases in the field itself. The example of Einstein is a different sort of evidence about science, and a different sort of appeal, than the arguments of Kuhn or Popper.
I didn't say it was a contradiction. I was asking you to clarify what you were saying. In any case I answered for both possibilities.
As I argued elsewhere, I don't think this distinction is decisive.
But now you are simply not answering what I wrote, but are beating up a straw man. My original statement was:
In other words, I am admitting that they are wrong (I say "may" but my intent is that I am persuaded by the evidence from the OED), so if we treat them as prosecution lawyers I would say as the jury that they have lost the case and the defense has won, but I am saying that Language Log goes too far in saying that they "don't deserve our attention" - i.e. that they should not have been permitted into the courtroom in the first place. That takes it one step too far, and I pointed that out.
Sorry, I took 'which is it' as meaning it must be one or the other. I think that the distinction is, while not perfect, well worth making. If we're being philosophers of science, we listen to what Feynman says about physics, but our response can be to disagree. If it's understood that some hold Feynman's position, the simple fact he says it doesn't itself constitute direct evidence. Whereas if we're being philosophers of science and someone points out that our theory about what science can do clashes with what one of Feynman's theories actually did, we have to engage with that in a different way.
On refusing them from the courtroom, LangagueLog obviously thinks they are simply bad commentators. It refers to 'the perennially clueless Strunk and White'. I don't know the area well enough to know if that's fair.
But your counter-argument was that we should listen to White because he was a literary success, and that argument was founded on the comparison to appeals to Chaucer and Shakespeare. The fact is that White was being referred to as a bad commentator, which is very consistent with being a good author. And Chaucer and Shakespeare were being referred to as influential and representative authors, not simply succesful ones.
I disagree, because I think that being a bad commentator on writing is not "very consistent" with being a good writer. That is not a comfortable fit. It is technically consistent (i.e. possible), but not very consistent (i.e. probable). Similarly, Feynman being a good physicist would be technically consistent with making outrageously false statements about what science is in his popular essays, but it would not be a comfortable fit. We do not expect someone who has no clue about what science is to actually be a good scientist, and we are right not to expect that. This is why, having seen that Feynman is a good scientist, we expect him to have a very good grasp of what science is and so we expect his popular essays about science to be insightful and largely true.
This is why I find the distinction being made here between writer and commentator on writing to be a bit thin.
I think we're coming from different ideas about this: in my experience, practicioners in any area often make absolutely horrible theorists about it. And at my university there was a physics professor who actively discouraged students from taking history and philosophy of science. Not because he thought it was worthless but because he felt it would blunt their scientific focus and abilities. This is all relative to those of similar intelligence/ability who haven't specialised: on average, those doing well at almost any intellectual/educated pursuit will correlate with doing well at others to a degree.
There are honourable exceptions, of course.
In any case, even if there is a close association, there's still a difference between someone's work as a practitioner and their work as a commentator.
That you do not find it very consistent is not relevant, because it happened. Even if you do not resolve it in the same direction as the people at Language Log, the contradiction between their writing and their advice on writing remains.