Another Try: Book of Abraham Translation Evidence from Sensen Papyrus and KEP

[Ed Goble]

So, a while ago, I posted a series of posts where I tried to explain my point of view on the Book of Abraham translation evidence in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and the Sensen Papyrus.

It tried to show, that from my point of view, the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and the Facsimiles Explanations, in their English form, are a reproduction of an ancient cipher key, which was created to use the Sensen Papyrus pictures to go along with a more ancient text that was originally separate from it.  I'm not saying that the Sensen papyrus contains the text of the Book of Abraham.  Rather, I am saying that a long time after the Book of Abraham was written, individuals decided it would be nice to add illustrations from already existing material to compliment the Book of Abraham, and that in doing so, they created an ancient hybrid composition that essentially became in function what we would modernly call a cipher key or a code table.

Yes, I recognize the similarity to this point of view to William Schryver's proposition.  The huge difference between this and his proposal is that I propose that this is ancient, and that the pairings between symbols and assigned meanings to symbols were an ancient production by ancient Egyptians in the Alexandrian period, and that there are actual, logical linkages between the meaning assignments and the symbols used.  And so, in essence in translating these things, what Joseph Smith did was to reveal the ancient information that manifests these pairings, where he reproduced an ancient substitution cipher key.  They aren't an actual straight-forward translation of characters like a dictionary, but are rather more like a legend on a map, where there are abstract characters with assignments to them, entirely dependent on the key, not on some inherent meaning in a symbol or word.  So, I am proposing that this is fundamentally ancient.

William Schryver, on the other hand, proposed a modern cipher created by Joseph Smith's scribes, used in the early days of Mormonism.

I have created a series of new articles on my blog that present this point of view in a different way from what I was doing before.

I want to focus on this article  in particular in this thread, where I believe I have presented my point of view in a very straight forward and clear fashion.  Cinepro, you in particular seem to have had a hard time understanding what I was getting at in previous threads.  I want to discuss this here, and see if somehow this article is still not plain enough.  I have put a ton of work into trying to get this as plain as possible, even for the most casual reader that doesn't really care to put a lot of thought into what he might be reading.

My blog is:  egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com

So please give feedback this time about how clear the article is, and whether you understand what it is saying.  I am not so much interested in whether you agree with this theory, but whether if you can understand what I'm saying.  I really think somehow that nobody could understand what I was saying before, and that was the real reason for the lack of cordiality and interest.  I consider this one of the most foundational articles to my point of view on my blog now.  The links to rest of the foundational articles that lead up to this one, that give the rest of the evidence, are shown at the top of the blog.  Cinepro, I think if you really take a look at this closely, you will see that what you thought I was saying, and what I was actually saying previously are two separate things.

EDIT:  As you can see further down in this thread, the accusation was made that I don't have a "theory", just a bunch of ideas, which is absurd.  The question was asked for me to summarize the BASIC theory in a couple of lines.  Here it is for those who care:

(1) Abraham wrote a book that was revealed to Joseph Smith into English.  The papyrus we have is not the one Abraham wrote.  It doesn't contain this text.

(2) What is on the papyrus?  A bunch of pictures.  These pictures are all nifty illustrations for the Book of Abraham.  There are things that link these pictures to concepts in the Book of Abraham.  Even things typically thought of as "text" in that papyrus are just little pictures used as illustrations for the Book of Abraham.

I've even added an Introductory Foundational Article for those who want to see this plainly on my blog:

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com/p/what-are-basics-of-this-theory-about.html

Edited September 8, 2016 by Ed Goble

[Oliver_Cowdery]

I read your blog post and still don't really understand what you are getting at.  As with anyone who proposes a hypothesis, I ask you a few questions with hope of understanding what problems your hypothesis answers and how does it solve those problems.

What evidence do you have for your hypothesis?

Does your hypothesis explain the evidence better than other hypothesis's? 

Is your hypothesis falsifiable? How?

What sort of things does your model of the translation predict?  Can you test those predictions?

[Ed Goble]

3 minutes ago, Oliver_Cowdery said:

I read your blog post and still don't really understand what you are getting at.  As with anyone who proposes a hypothesis, I ask you a few questions with hope of understanding what problems your hypothesis answers and how does it solve those problems.

What evidence do you have for your hypothesis?

Does your hypothesis explain the evidence better than other hypothesis's? 

Is your hypothesis falsifiable? How?

What sort of things does your model of the translation predict?  Can you test those predictions?

I have a hard time believing that you didn't understand that article.  Sorry.

I have reverse-engineered portions of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and have evidence for what they represent.  Its hard to believe that you can't see that.  If you aren't serious about this, please move on.

Yes, absolutely, it does it better.  Because no other hypothesis explains them from an ancient point of view.  They all want to make them into something that Joseph Smith said they weren't:  either a modern production of modern people, or a false translation.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Ed Goble

[stemelbow]

36 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

So, a while ago, I posted a series of posts where I tried to explain my point of view on the Book of Abraham translation evidence in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and the Sensen Papyrus.

It tried to show, that from my point of view, the Kirtland Egyptian Papers and the Facsimiles Explanations, in their English form, are a reproduction of an ancient cipher key, which was created to use the Sensen Papyrus pictures to go along with a more ancient text that was originally separate from it.  I'm not saying that the Sensen papyrus contains the text of the Book of Abraham.  Rather, I am saying that a long time after the Book of Abraham was written, individuals decided it would be nice to add illustrations from already existing material to compliment the Book of Abraham, and that in doing so, they created an ancient hybrid composition that essentially became in function what we would modernly call a cipher key or a code table.

Yes, I recognize the similarity to this point of view to William Schryver's proposition.  The huge difference between this and his proposal is that I propose that this is ancient, and that the pairings between symbols and assigned meanings to symbols were an ancient production by ancient Egyptians in the Alexandrian period, and that there are actual, logical linkages between the meaning assignments and the symbols used.  And so, in essence in translating these things, what Joseph Smith did was to reveal the ancient information that manifests these pairings, where he reproduced an ancient substitution cipher key.  They aren't an actual straight-forward translation of characters like a dictionary, but are rather more like a legend on a map, where there are abstract characters with assignments to them, entirely dependent on the key, not on some inherent meaning in a symbol or word.  So, I am proposing that this is fundamentally ancient.

William Schryver, on the other hand, proposed a modern cipher created by Joseph Smith's scribes, used in the early days of Mormonism.

I have created a series of new articles on my blog that present this point of view in a different way from what I was doing before.

I want to focus on this article in particular in this thread, where I believe I have presented my point of view in a very straight forward and clear fashion.  Cinepro, you in particular seem to have had a hard time understanding what I was getting at in previous threads.  I want to discuss this here, and see if somehow this article is still not plain enough.  I have put a ton of work into trying to get this as plain as possible, even for the most casual reader that doesn't really care to put a lot of thought into what he might be reading.

My blog is:  egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com

So please give feedback this time about how clear the article is, and whether you understand what it is saying.  I am not so much interested in whether you agree with this theory, but whether if you can understand what I'm saying.  I really think somehow that nobody could understand what I was saying before, and that was the real reason for the lack of cordiality and interest.  I consider this one of the most foundational articles to my point of view on my blog now.  The links to rest of the foundational articles that lead up to this one, that give the rest of the evidence, are shown at the top of the blog.  Cinepro, I think if you really take a look at this closely, you will see that what you thought I was saying, and what I was actually saying previously are two separate things.

 

I'm not getting anything by clicking the link.  I can go to your blog but I'm not sure which article you're alluding to.  I'll be interested to see if I can figure out how your proposed idea can be supported.  It seems unlikely to me at this point.

[Ed Goble]

2 minutes ago, stemelbow said:

I'm not getting anything by clicking the link.  I can go to your blog but I'm not sure which article you're alluding to.  I'll be interested to see if I can figure out how your proposed idea can be supported.  It seems unlikely to me at this point.

I fixed the link in the OP (I think).  But this is even more reason why I don't believe "oliver cowdery" when he says that he read the article.  Even I tried the link that I posted and it didn't work at first.

Here it is again: LINK . And just in case it still doesn't work:  http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com/p/dictionaries-what-is-dictionary-is.html

Maybe that can be copied and pasted.

[Oliver_Cowdery]

19 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

I have reverse-engineered portions of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers...

Perhaps this is what I missed from your explanation.  You saw a pattern, but isn't it a little presumptuous to say you reverse-engineered anything at this point? 

29 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

... and have evidence for what they represent. 

What evidence did you provide for your hypothesis?

 

19 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

Yes, absolutely, it does it better.  Because no other hypothesis explains them from an ancient point of view.  They all want to make them into something that Joseph Smith said they weren't:  either a modern production of modern people, or a false translation.

Thank you for explaining that.  I think I see your motivations more clearly now.

[Oliver_Cowdery]

Your original link was just missing a colon after the "http"

[Ed Goble]

4 minutes ago, Oliver_Cowdery said:

Perhaps this is what I missed from your explanation.  You saw a pattern, but isn't it a little presumptuous to say you reverse-engineered anything at this point? 

What evidence did you provide for your hypothesis?

 

Thank you for explaining that.  I think I see your motivations more clearly now.

No, it is not presumptuous, because the theoretical framework is now baked, and because the number of examples is now growing.

[Oliver_Cowdery]

3 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

No, it is not presumptuous, because the theoretical framework is now baked, and because the number of examples is now growing.

I know the shouldering the burden of proof can be difficult. What evidence do you have?

Do you have evidence that the SenSen papyrus was written with the intent to be deciphered in the way you are proposing?

[Ed Goble]

10 minutes ago, Oliver_Cowdery said:

I know the shouldering the burden of proof can be difficult. What evidence do you have?

Do you have evidence that the SenSen papyrus was written with the intent to be deciphered in the way you are proposing?

Yes.  It seems that you need to familiarize yourself with the content of the blog and come back and talk.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Ed Goble

[Oliver_Cowdery]

1 minute ago, Ed Goble said:

Yes.  It seems that you need to familiarize yourself with the content of the blog and come back and talk.

I guess I just don't see how anything your wrote there qualifies as evidence.

[Ed Goble]

1 minute ago, Oliver_Cowdery said:

I guess I just don't see how anything your wrote there qualifies as evidence.

ok.  well, then, moving on to people that are interested...

[cinepro]

1 hour ago, Ed Goble said:

I want to focus on this article  in particular in this thread, where I believe I have presented my point of view in a very straight forward and clear fashion.  Cinepro, you in particular seem to have had a hard time understanding what I was getting at in previous threads.  I want to discuss this here, and see if somehow this article is still not plain enough.  I have put a ton of work into trying to get this as plain as possible, even for the most casual reader that doesn't really care to put a lot of thought into what he might be reading.

 

 

I apologize for the confusion.

It's not that I don't understand what you are trying to say, it's that I understand what you are trying to say and think it is wrong. 

I know that to you, those must be the same thing because no one that truly understands you could disagree with you.   

But as I've often said, creative thinking and imagination can be critically important aspects of apologetics, and on that level, you have hit a home run and I applaud the time you've taken to address this important issue.  Some of the best apologetic theories transcend simple logic and become a thing of beauty in their construction, and such "beautiful" thinking can only be the product of a "beautiful mind."

 

Edited September 7, 2016 by cinepro

[Ed Goble]

1 minute ago, cinepro said:

I apologize for the confusion.

It's not that I don't understand what you are trying to say, it's that I understand what you are trying to say and think it is wrong. 

I know that to you, those must be the same thing because no one that truly understands you could disagree with you.

But as I've often said, creative thinking and imagination can be critically important aspects of apologetics, and on that level, you have hit a home run and I applaud the time you've taken to address this important issue.

 

Well, sir, now I can respect that you disagree with it, since at least we are on the same page as to what I am saying.  Thanks.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Ed Goble

[Oliver_Cowdery]

4 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

ok.  well, then, moving on to people that are interested...

Don't take it personally, I am just asking for evidence.

I am very interested in how people reconcile the Book of Abraham.

[Ed Goble]

2 minutes ago, Oliver_Cowdery said:

Don't take it personally, I am just asking for evidence.

I am very interested in how people reconcile the Book of Abraham.

You are welcome to come to your own conclusion about the evidence after your own work in looking at the blog.  I've done my part.  Now comes yours.  You are welcome to study it in depth and decide for yourself, and even post specific questions about certain things here that are very specific.  Otherwise, my conversation is pretty much over with you, because I am not here to engage you in this fashion.

[cinepro]

23 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

You are welcome to come to your own conclusion about the evidence after your own work in looking at the blog.  I've done my part.  Now comes yours.  You are welcome to study it in depth and decide for yourself, and even post specific questions about certain things here that are very specific.  Otherwise, my conversation is pretty much over with you, because I am not here to engage you in this fashion.

I think part of the problem is that you're trying to convince not with an abundance of evidence, but with verbosity.  Try summarizing the theory in one or two clear sentences and going from there.

[Ed Goble]

1 hour ago, cinepro said:

I think part of the problem is that you're trying to convince not with an abundance of evidence, but with verbosity.  Try summarizing the theory in one or two clear sentences and going from there.

Sorry.  Just because you claim I don't have evidence is not proof that I do not in fact have evidence.  I'm just not going to sit here and be told that the burden is on me anymore.  I've done what I've done.  Its you people's turn to examine it if you care.  I've gone WAY out of my way to make the evidence accessible.  You can either take it or leave it on my terms.  I'm not going to be bullied by trolls or anyone else that thinks they can control the flow of the conversation toward a "I just don't get it" or "this is a pile of stupidity" just because they haven't read the content.  That type of thing is over, and I won't engage in it.  If you think the arguments have no merit, that is your business and your prerogative, but its not because I didn't deliver substance.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Ed Goble

[cinepro]

16 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

Sorry.  Just because you claim I don't have evidence is not proof that I do not in fact have evidence.  I'm just not going to sit here and be told that the burden is on me anymore.  I've done what I've done.  Its you people's turn to examine it if you care.  I've gone WAY out of my way to make the evidence accessible.  You can either take it or leave it on my terms.  I'm not going to be bullied by trolls or anyone else that thinks they can control the flow of the conversation toward a "I just don't get it" or "this is a pile of stupidity" just because they haven't read the content.  That type of thing is over, and I won't engage in it.  If you think the arguments have no merit, that is your business and your prerogative, but its not because I didn't deliver substance.

 

I suspect some of the resistance you may run into from both believers and non believers in The Book of Abraham is that there are two much simpler and more suitable theories available.

Just to be clear, you are suggesting that the papyri that Joseph Smith obtained in Kirtland did contain the actual "Book of Abraham", but it wasn't recorded in regular Egyptian, but instead was deliberately and carefully "encoded" in what looks like regular Egyptian writing using a combination of "visual puns" and other hidden meanings that to this point, the alternate hidden meanings haven't been discernible to conventional scholars (including LDS Scholars)?

 

[Ed Goble]

13 minutes ago, cinepro said:

 

I suspect some of the resistance you may run into from both believers and non believers in The Book of Abraham is that there are two much simpler and more suitable theories available.

Just to be clear, you are suggesting that the papyri that Joseph Smith obtained in Kirtland did contain the actual "Book of Abraham", but it wasn't recorded in regular Egyptian, but instead was deliberately and carefully "encoded" in what looks like regular Egyptian writing using a combination of "visual puns" and other hidden meanings that to this point, the alternate hidden meanings haven't been discernible to conventional scholars (including LDS Scholars)?

 

Not at all.  And I really wish that you too would "get it."  But after I've done a lot of what I have done just for you in particular, just because you were one that I really wanted to get through to on the last several threads, I so wish I could communicate with you.  I really wish somehow I could communicate with you in particular, because I happen to like you.

This papyrus doesn't contain the Book of Abraham at all.

Imagine a whiteboard that is dependent on what someone writes on it.  A whiteboard does not have text on it until the text is written on it.  A variable in algebra doesn't have a value until its actually used in a math problem.

Edited September 7, 2016 by Ed Goble

[cinepro]

4 minutes ago, Ed Goble said:

Not at all.  And I really wish that you too would "get it."  But after I've done a lot of what I have done just for you in particular, just because you were one that I really wanted to get through to on the last several threads, I so wish I could communicate with you.  I really wish somehow I could communicate with you in particular, because I happen to like you.

This papyrus doesn't contain the Book of Abraham at all.

Imagine a whiteboard that is dependent on what someone writes on it.  A whiteboard does not have text on it until the text is written on it.  A variable in algebra doesn't have a value until its actually used in a problem.

Can you even explain your theory in one or two sentences?  As others have noticed as well as myself, you seem to only have principles and concepts but not an actual theory, and you think that if you talk about these concepts enough, it will somehow result in an actual "theory."  But so far, there's nothing there.

But prove me wrong.  Go ahead and explain your theory (without analogies, explanation and exposition) in two or three sentences.  I don't think you can do it because I don't think there's actually a theory buried in there.

I'll even start you off:

"I, Ed Goble, theorize that ______________________ happened, which resulted in the creation of The Book of Abraham in Kirtland in the 1830s."

[Ed Goble]

18 hours ago, cinepro said:

Can you even explain your theory in one or two sentences?  As others have noticed as well as myself, you seem to only have principles and concepts but not an actual theory, and you think that if you talk about these concepts enough, it will somehow result in an actual "theory."  But so far, there's nothing there.

But prove me wrong.  Go ahead and explain your theory (without analogies, explanation and exposition) in two or three sentences.  I don't think you can do it because I don't think there's actually a theory buried in there.

I'll even start you off:

"I, Ed Goble, theorize that ______________________ happened, which resulted in the creation of The Book of Abraham in Kirtland in the 1830s."

(1) Abraham wrote a book that was revealed to Joseph Smith into English.  The papyrus we have is not the one Abraham wrote.  It doesn't contain this text.

(2) What is on the papyrus?  A bunch of pictures.  These pictures are all nifty illustrations for the Book of Abraham.  There are things that link these pictures to concepts in the Book of Abraham.

Is there anything disagreeable now?  Is there anything that confuses anyone about these two items?

I've even added an Introductory Foundational Article for those who want to see this plainly on my blog:

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com/p/what-are-basics-of-this-theory-about.html

Edited September 8, 2016 by Ed Goble

[cinepro]

That's fair enough.  But didn't Joseph Smith claim to be translating both the "characters or the hieroglyphics"?  But would your theory be saying the he didn't actually translate the "characters"?

 

Quote

 

[W]ith

W. W. Phelps and Oliver Cowdery as scribes, I commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the [scrolls] contained the writings of Abraham, another the writings of Joseph of Egypt, etc. – a more full account of which will appear in its place, as I proceed to examine or unfold them.^[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Abraham#CITEREFSmith1902

Edited September 8, 2016 by cinepro

[Robert F. Smith]

On 9/7/2016 at 11:42 AM, Ed Goble said:

.............................................

the BASIC theory in a couple of lines.  Here it is for those who care:

(1) Abraham wrote a book that was revealed to Joseph Smith into English.  The papyrus we have is not the one Abraham wrote.  It doesn't contain this text.

(2) What is on the papyrus?  A bunch of pictures.  These pictures are all nifty illustrations for the Book of Abraham.  There are things that link these pictures to concepts in the Book of Abraham.  Even things typically thought of as "text" in that papyrus are just little pictures used as illustrations for the Book of Abraham.

I've even added an Introductory Foundational Article for those who want to see this plainly on my blog:

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com/p/what-are-basics-of-this-theory-about.html

In your part 13, Ed, you speak about the conciliar nature of the LDS Church, and that even Joseph and his scribes constituted a council.  I don't know of any evidence for that latter council.  Are any and every group a "council"?  However, just for the sake of argument, let's say that they are:  Does that carry any weight in discussion of the BofA, and does that convince us that Joseph had complete charge of the process?

Also, one could speak of scholarly groups as councils in that same sense:  They engage in scholarly give and take.  They cite each other in formal presentations, and are subject to peer review, whether they like it or not.  Whatever rejection, refinements, or acceptance of disparate views take place within that larger scholarly community are all on record and are very specific.  We can go back in history and examine the stream of changes in theories and interpretations in a wide variety of fields.  We should be able to do the same with views on the BofA.  Scholars do that via detailed and very specific conversation with other scholars -- all of whom cite their sources.  It is a lot of bother, but it pays dividends.

You seem not to be much interested in such a conversation.  In addition, your statements on the Basic Theory don't really get into the nitty gritty.  For example, you don't state what sort of revelatory process was used by Joseph in receiving the BofA.  Did he read it on a stone?  Did it simply come to him in a burst of inspiration, while his scribes took down verbatim dictation?  Did he consult no papyrus at all during that receipt of revelation?  You speak of a papyrus owned by the Church (singular) not being the one written by Abraham, but rather by a priest in the Greco-Roman era.  Yet Joseph had a number of papyri, not all of which survived to this day, but some are now in possession of the Church.  You don't bother to discuss them in scholarly terms.  As for that one papyrus which you do mention (the SenSen), you claim that it contains "a bunch of pictures."  You don't bother to discuss the actual contents in terms of writing along with a specific number of pictures.  Why that careless approach?  Shouldn't you be more exacting and careful?  After all, why would you deliberately set out to allow your detractors to fix on such puny mistakes, rather than helping them focus on more substantial matters?

[mfbukowski]

On 9/7/2016 at 10:54 AM, Oliver_Cowdery said:

I read your blog post and still don't really understand what you are getting at.  As with anyone who proposes a hypothesis, I ask you a few questions with hope of understanding what problems your hypothesis answers and how does it solve those problems.

What evidence do you have for your hypothesis?

Does your hypothesis explain the evidence better than other hypothesis's? 

Is your hypothesis falsifiable? How?

What sort of things does your model of the translation predict?  Can you test those predictions?

Oh my.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/

Quote

 

2. Holist Underdetermination and Challenges to Scientific Rationality

2.1 Holist Underdetermination: The Very Idea

Duhem's original case for holist underdetermination is, perhaps unsurprisingly, intimately bound up with his arguments for confirmational holism: the claim that theories or hypotheses can only be subjected to empirical testing in groups or collections, never in isolation. The idea here is that a single scientific hypothesis does not by itself carry any implications about what we should expect to observe in nature; rather, we can derive empirical consequences from an hypothesis only when it is conjoined with many other beliefs and hypotheses, including background assumptions about the world, beliefs about how measuring instruments operate, further hypotheses about the interactions between objects in the original hypothesis' field of study and the surrounding environment, etc. For this reason, Duhem argues, when an empirical prediction turns out to be falsified, we do not know whether the fault lies with the hypothesis we originally sought to test or with one of the many other beliefs and hypotheses that were also needed and used to generate the failed prediction:

A physicist decides to demonstrate the inaccuracy of a proposition; in order to deduce from this proposition the prediction of a phenomenon and institute the experiment which is to show whether this phenomenon is or is not produced, in order to interpret the results of this experiment and establish that the predicted phenomenon is not produced, he does not confine himself to making use of the proposition in question; he makes use also of a whole group of theories accepted by him as beyond dispute. The prediction of the phenomenon, whose nonproduction is to cut off debate, does not derive from the proposition challenged if taken by itself, but from the proposition at issue joined to that whole group of theories; if the predicted phenomenon is not produced, the only thing the experiment teaches us is that among the propositions used to predict the phenomenon and to establish whether it would be produced, there is at least one error; but where this error lies is just what it does not tell us. ([1914] 1954, 185)

Duhem supports this claim with examples from physical theory, including one designed to illustrate a celebrated further consequence he draws from it. Holist underdetermination ensures, Duhem argues, that there cannot be any such thing as a “crucial experiment”: a single experiment whose outcome is predicted differently by two competing theories and which therefore serves to definitively confirm one and refute the other. For example, in a famous scientific episode intended to resolve the ongoing heated battle between partisans of the theory that light consists of a stream of particles moving at extremely high speed (the particle or “emission” theory of light) and defenders of the view that light consists instead of waves propagated through a mechanical medium (the wave theory), the physicist Foucault designed an apparatus to test the two theories' competing claims about the speed of transmission of light in different media: the particle theory implied that light would travel faster in water than in air, while the wave theory implied that the reverse was true. Although the outcome of the experiment was taken to show that light travels faster in air than in water,[3] Duhem argues that this is far from a refutation of the hypothesis of emission:

in fact, what the experiment declares stained with error is the whole group of propositions accepted by Newton, and after him by Laplace and Biot, that is, the whole theory from which we deduce the relation between the index of refraction and the velocity of light in various media. But in condemning this system as a whole by declaring it stained with error, the experiment does not tell us where the error lies. Is it in the fundamental hypothesis that light consists in projectiles thrown out with great speed by luminous bodies? Is it in some other assumption concerning the actions experienced by light corpuscles due to the media in which they move? We know nothing about that. It would be rash to believe, as Arago seems to have thought, that Foucault's experiment condemns once and for all the very hypothesis of emission, i.e., the assimilation of a ray of light to a swarm of projectiles. If physicists had attached some value to this task, they would undoubtedly have succeeded in founding on this assumption a system of optics that would agree with Foucault's experiment. ([1914] 1954, p. 187)

From this and similar examples, Duhem drew the quite general conclusion that our response to the experimental or observational falsification of a theory is always underdetermined in this way. When the world does not live up to our theory-grounded expectations, we must give upsomething, but because no hypothesis is ever tested in isolation, no experiment ever tells us precisely which belief it is that we must revise or give up as mistaken:

In sum, the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses; when the experiment is in disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not designate which one should be changed. ([1914] 1954, 187)

The predicament Duhem here identifies is no rainy day puzzle for philosophers of science, but a methodological challenge that constantly arises in the course of scientific practice itself. It is simply not true that for practical purposes and in concrete contexts a single revision of our beliefs in response to disconfirming evidence is always obviously correct, or the most promising, or the only or even most sensible avenue to pursue. To cite a classic example, when Newton's celestial mechanics failed to correctly predict the orbit of Uranus, scientists at the time did not simply abandon the theory but protected it from refutation by instead challenging the background assumption that the solar system contained only seven planets. This strategy bore fruit, notwithstanding the falsity of Newton's theory: by calculating the location of a hypothetical eighth planet influencing the orbit of Uranus, the astronomers Adams and Leverrier were eventually led to discover Neptune in 1846. But the very same strategy failed when used to try to explain the advance of the perihelion in Mercury's orbit by postulating the existence of “Vulcan”, an additional planet located between Mercury and the sun, and this phenomenon would resist satisfactory explanation until the arrival of Einstein's theory of general relativity. So it seems that Duhem was right to suggest not only that hypotheses must be tested as a group or a collection, but also that it is by no means a foregone conclusion which member of such a collection should be abandoned or revised in response to a failed empirical test or false implication. Indeed, this very example illustrates why Duhem's own rather hopeful appeal to the ‘good sense’ of scientists themselves in deciding when a given hypothesis ought to be abandoned promises very little if any relief from the general predicament of holist underdetermination.

As noted above, Duhem thought that the sort of underdetermination he had described presented a challenge only for theoretical physics, but subsequent thinking in the philosophy of science has tended to the opinion that the predicament Duhem described applies to theoretical testing in all fields of scientific inquiry. We cannot, for example, test an hypothesis about the phenotypic effects of a particular gene without presupposing a host of further beliefs about what genes are, how they work, how we can identify them, what other genes are doing, and so on. And in the middle of the 20th Century, W. V. O. Quine would incorporate confirmational holism and its associated concerns about underdetermination into an extraordinarily influential account of knowledge in general. As part of his famous (1951) critique of the widely accepted distinction between truths that are analytic (true by definition, or as a matter of logic or language alone) and those that are synthetic (true in virtue of some contingent fact about the way the world is), Quine argued instead that all of the beliefs we hold at any given time are linked in an interconnected web, which encounters our sensory experience only at its periphery:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole. (1951, 42–3)

 

There are no facts, only interpretations of "evidence" you personally have qualified as "evidence".   This applies to all theories- I am not in favor or against Goble's theories or any others.