July 24, 2011 · 2:42 pm

AMB

August 11, 2011 at 6:50 am

Very interesting stuff.

I followed your link back and started messing around with it a little myself. I found something of a contrapositive:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=The+Bible+says%2C+Scientists+say&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Reply
Wm Jas

August 11, 2011 at 3:08 pm

Interesting results — but perhaps not totally incompatible with what I found. “God has revealed” and “studies have shown” both imply an acceptance of the authority in question and a belief in that which has been revealed/shown. Your phrases do not. “Studies have shown” is used to present something as a established fact, but “scientists say” often has overtones of “or so the Germans would have us believe.” (Who is more likely to say “Scientists say people evolved from lower animals,” a believer in evolution or a skeptic?) Religious believers and skeptics can both say “the Bible says,” but “God has revealed” implies a belief in actual revelation.

Reply
Pingback: Some notes on the dark arts of rhetoric | Bugs to fearen babes withall

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Google+ account. ( Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:

Epistemological fashions