Anatoly_Vorobey comments on Rationality Quotes January 2015 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Gondolinian 01 January 2015 02:23AM

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Comment author: Anatoly_Vorobey 10 January 2015 06:26:44PM 4 points [-]

I do not see how this suggestion could be positively refuted. It enjoys a status well known in academic circles and doubtless elsewhere,—that of the Remotely Conceivable Alternative, contrary to the obvious implication of the facts, incapable of proof or disproof.

-- Denys L. Page (1908-1978), History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 57

Comment author: Nomad 10 January 2015 07:05:28PM 1 point [-]

Any context? (e.g. what the suggestion is)

Comment author: gjm 10 January 2015 09:27:01PM 3 points [-]

A Google Books search for "positively refuted" yields the following:

A second loop-hole concerns only the alien invaders. It is theoretically possible that the Troy-invaders might have adopted the Gray Minyan Ware technique from the Hellas-invaders in circumstances which include no implication about community of culture. The two parties, though involved in the same great migration, might be racially different, and the Troy-invaders might have moved later than the Hellas-invaders. The former might have settled for a time en route somewhere near the fringes of the latter -- in the region of Macedonia and Chalcidice, perhaps, -- remaining in contact long enough to learn the technique of this ceramic art (and apparently nothing else.) [ANATOLY'S QUOTE GOES HERE] The Aegean shores were invaded in the same era by two peoples sharing a specialized and otherwise unknown technique in pottery: common sense will always insist that the two peoples were kindred in culture, -- that their association was not brief, peripheral, and more or less fortuitous, but protracted and intimate.