From: graham@maths.su.oz.au (Graham Matthews)
Subject: Re: Words Feminists find Demeaning!
Organization: Sydney University Computing Service, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 11:52:59 GMT

[Behnam I have pruned the post heavily to concentrate on the fundamental
issues and to keep the time constraints down on both sides of the debate]

Graham:
>About this time I begin to wonder if you are reading my posts. Lets get
>this clear I am not attacking Islam in any way shape or form. All I am
>doing is noting that a human *CANNOT* read the written word without
>*INTERPRETING* it - do you dispute this fact? If so please tell me
>why?

(Behnam Sadeghi) writes:
>I don't dispute at all the fact that "a human cannot read the written
>word without interpreting it."  However, this premise does not imply
>in any way your claim that "no one actually knows what the intention
>of God and his prophet is."   [You can only arrive at this conclusion
>if you assume every "interpretation" is necessarily false.  But we have
>no reason to believe this to be the case.  So, there may indeed be
>many people who know exactly what the intention of God and his prophet
>is.].

Sure we have no reason to believe that every interpretation is false,
but by the same token we have no reason to assume that *any* interpretation
is true.

So now we are in agreement that humans cannot read something without
interpreting it.

Ok then tell me, say we have two interpretations, I1 and I2, of the
same passage. How are we to decide which of the interpretations is
"more correct" than the other?

(Behnam Sadeghi) writes:
>O.K., I agree with your correction, i.e. that "we could choose a 
>method to best satisfy AN INTERPRETATION OF A DEFINITION but this
>then leaves the problem of how do we know which interpretation is 
>correct."   Well, as you said, communication is possible.  And the
>basic ideas of Islam have been communicated to people with such
>clarity that Muslims, i.e. about a billion people, are unanimous about
>what the "INTERPRETATION OF THE DEFINITION" of Islam is.  

So there is no disagreement at all within Islam? Many of the women
in the Islamic women's group here in Sydney would disagree with you.
What about the split of Islam into two camps?

(Behnam Sadeghi) writes:
>I disagree.  Perfect communication is possible.  Perhaps this example
>will demonstrate what I mean:
>X communicates text T, with correct interpretation TX.  A hundred people
>receive T, but they interprete it differently, so that there are about
>20 different interpretations of text T current among them.  It may very
>well be that a number of the people happen to have interpretation TX,
>i.e. the correction interpretation.  Let's say seventy of them have this
>correct interpretation.   Then text T has been communicated perfectly
>to these seventy people.  So, perfect communication is possible, though
>not always guaranteed.

Ok indeed perfect communication is possible, BUT given any one of those
100 interpretations, how can I tell whether or not it is a correct
interpretation? This is the issue.

graham

--
Graham Matthews                 And it's true we are immune
Pure Math, Uni.Sydney, Oz       When fact is fiction and T.V. is reality
graham@maths.su.oz.au
Xref: sparky alt.atheism:14090 alt.atheism.moderated:5