Quote from context (sometimes referred to as contour or quote mining ) is an informal error and a wrong type of attribution where a part is removed from surrounding matter in such a way as to distort the intended meaning. Contextomies may be intentional, as well as deliberate if someone misunderstands the meaning and eliminates something important to clarify, thinking it becomes unimportant.
Arguments based on these errors usually take two forms:
- As a straw man argument, this involves quoting an opponent out of context to misinterpret their position (usually to make it appear simpler or extreme) to make it easier to argue. That's normal in politics.
- As an attraction to authority, it involves citing authority on subjects outside the context, to misinterpret such authority as a supporter of several positions.
Video Quoting out of context
Kontekstomi
Contextomy refers to selective quote words from the context of their native language in a way that distorts the intended meaning of the source, a practice commonly referred to as "quoting from context". The problem here is not the removal of quotations from the original context per se (because of all the quotes), but on the quota decision to exclude from the closest phrase or sentence quotation (which is the "context") "Under the exception" to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice with excision surgery, journalist Milton Mayer coined the term "context" to explain its use by Julius Streicher, editor of the famous Nazi slogan "Der StÃÆ'¼rmer" in the Weimar era Germany. To arouse anti-Semitic sentiments among the weekly Christian readers of the working class, Streicher regularly publishes cut quotes from the Talmudic text which, in a nutshell, appears to support greed, slavery, and ritual murder. Although rarely employed for these dangerous extremes, context is a common method of misrepresentation in contemporary mass media, and research has shown that the effects of this misunderstanding can linger even after the audience is exposed to the original, in context, the quote.
In ads
One of the best known examples of contextualities is the ubiquitous "Review description" in advertisements. The lure of media exposure associated with being "embezzled" by a large studio may encourage some criticism for writing positive reviews about mediocre movies. However, even when the overall review is negative, the studio has some reservations about quoting it in a way that misrepresents critics' opinions.
For example, an ad copy for the 1995 New Line Cinema Se7en thriller thriller linked to Owen Gleiberman, a critic for Entertainment Weekly, uses the commentary "small masterpiece." Gleiberman really gave Se-a-B a whole and merely praised the opening of credit so majestically: "The order of credit, with fretted frames and flashes of the psychopayhernalia near the bottom, is a small masterpiece of dementia." Similarly, United Artists has criticized the critic Kenneth Turan's comments about their failure Hoodlum, including just one word from him - "unbearable" - in a movie ad copy: "Even the burning performance of Laurence Fishburne can not trigger > Hoodlum , the epic of a gangster that produces less heat than a nickel cigar.T Fishburne 'Bumpy' is ferocious, magnet, unbearable even... But even this actor can only do so much. "As a result of this violation , some critics now deliberately avoid colorful language in their reviews. In 2010, the pop culture magazine Vanity Fair reported that it was the victim of a "desperate seductress" after Lost television had taken part in the "most confusing, asinine, ridiculous - but somehow it's amazing - an all-time television show "and just quoted" the most amazing television show of all time "in its promotional material. Carl Bialik recorded an example of an adverb that applied to different verbs in 2007 commercials for Live Free or Die Hard , where excerpts of hysterical overproduced and surprisingly entertaining "reduced to" hysterical... entertaining ".
In the United States, there is no special law against film advertising that is misleading, beyond the existing rules of false advertising. The MPAA reviews advertisements for tones and content rather than the accuracy of their quotes. Some studios seek approval from the original critics before running a thick excerpt. Unfair EU Commercial Practice Directives prohibit context, and target companies that "claim accreditation" for their products in a way that is "not true to the [original] support terms". It is enacted in the United Kingdom by the Fair Trade Office, and carries a maximum penalty in there of a fine of Ã, Â £ 5,000 or two years in prison.
Maps Quoting out of context
Creation-evolution controversy
Scientists and their supporters used the term "quote mining" as early as the mid-1990s in a newsgroup post to illustrate the practice of quoting from a particular creationist. This term is used by members of the scientific community to describe the methods used by creationists to support their argument, though it can and is often used outside the controversy of evolution-creation. The complaint about this practice was first known using the term: Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in his famous work in 1973 "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution":
Their favorite [Creationist] sport of assembling quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken from context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself are amused and amazed to read themselves quoted in a way that shows that we are really anti-revolution under the skin.
This has been compared to the Christian theological method of prooftexting:
Pseudoscientists often express themselves in the way they handle scientific literature. Their idea of ​​doing scientific research is simply reading magazines and scientific monographs. They focus on words, not on the underlying facts and reasons. They take knowledge to be all statements by scientists . Science degenerates into a secular substitute for sacred literature. Any statement by any scientist may be cited against any other statement. Every important statement and every statement is open to interpretation.
The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) describes the use of "misleading evolutionist quotations out of context" to "abolish the entire article [[an] and creationist claims about the lack of transit" as "smoke screen".
Both Answers in Genesis (AiG) and Henry M. Morris (founder of the ICR) have been accused of producing mined quote books. TalkOrigins Archive (TOA) states that "the entire book of this excerpt has been published" and a list of leading creationsists Henry M. Morris' That Their Words Can Be Used Against Them and > Revised Quote as an example, in addition to a number of online quote creation quote lists. Both AiG and ICR use the following quotation from Stephen Jay Gould on transitional forms.
The fossil record with its sudden transition does not offer support for gradual change. All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains little precious in the form of a transitional form; the transition between large groups suddenly is characteristic.
The context shows that Gould rejects the gradualist's explanation of the lack of support for gradual change for his own interpretation. He continues:
... The graduals usually extract themselves from this dilemma by applying extreme imperfections of the fossil record. Although I reject this argument (for reasons discussed in ["The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change"]), let us provide a traditional escape and ask different questions.
Knowing that creationists quoted him as if he were saying there was no transitional form, Gould replied:
Because we propose an interrupted balance to explain trends, it is very frustrating to be quoted again and again by creationists - whether through design or ignorance, I do not know - such as admitting that the fossil record does not include transitional forms. Punctuation occurs at the species level; Directional trends (on ladder models) are rife at higher transition rates in large groups.
" Absurd in the highest degree "
Since the mid-1990s, scientists and supporters have used the term 'quote mining' to illustrate the version of this practice as used by certain creationists in the evolution-creation controversy. An example found in the evolutionary debate is a quote outside the context of Charles Darwin in his book Origin of Species :
To assume that the eye with all its incomparable abilities to adjust the focus to different distances, to receive different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberrations, could have been formed by natural selection, it seems, I freely confess, sense. at the highest level.
This phrase, sometimes truncated to the phrase "absurd at the highest level", is often presented as part of a statement that Darwin himself believed that natural selection can not fully account for the complexities of life. However, Darwin goes on to explain that the absurdity of the evolution of the visible eye has no bar, and describes its evolution.
Quote in context is
To assume that the eye with all its incomparable abilities to adjust the focus to different distances, to receive different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberrations, could have been formed by natural selection, it seems, I freely confess, sense. at the highest level. But the reasoning tells me that if many gradations of perfect and complex eyes become so imperfect and simple, every level useful to its owner can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does not change slightly, and variations are inherited, which of course is so; and if there are variations or modifications in organs that have ever been useful to animals under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye can be shaped by natural selection, though can not be overcome by our imagination, can hardly be considered real..
Exit other context quote
In addition to the evolution-creation controversy, context citing errors are also used in other fields. In some instances, commentators have used the term quote mining , comparing the practices of others with creationation quotation excerpts.
- Entertainment: with The Times reported frequent abuse by promoters, for example, "I can not help feeling that, for all the energy, razzmatazz and sorcerer technically, the audience has been degraded "peeled down to" owning 'energy, razzmatazz and technical magic' ".
- Politics: Firing Shirley Sherrod: In 2010, Breitbart released a USDA director's speech video, Shirley Sherrod, stating that she was racist to a white farmer who approached her for help.. Shortly after, Sherrod was fired for comments in the video. Then, a longer video showing the entire speech indicates that Sherrod explicitly rejects the racist interpretation of the short clip originally published. Sherrod sues Breitbart and others for defamation and his case is settled out of court.
- Travel: The Guardian contains an article in May 2013 with subheadings "Sri Lanka has hotels, food, climate and charm to offer the perfect holiday," said Ruaridh Nicoll. Just a pity about the increasingly despotic government. "The highly edited version of this article was immediately posted on the official Sri Lankan news portal under the heading" Sri Lanka has everything to offer the perfect holiday "[sic].
- Pseudohistory: The book review at The New York Times recounts "distortion by negligence" by Lerone Bennett Jr. in quoting a letter from Abraham Lincoln as proof that he "did not openly oppose the Know-Not Know Anti-immigrant Party" because, as Lincoln explained, "they are mostly my old political and personal friends," while ignoring to mention that the rest of the letter describes the Lincoln break with the former Whig Party. his colleagues, and his anticipation of "the painful necessity of me taking an open attitude toward them."
- Alternative medicine: The analysis of evidence submitted by the British Homeopathic Association to the House of Commons Evidence Check On Homoeopathy contains many examples of quote mining, where conclusions from scientific papers are selectively cited to make them appear to support efficacy homeopathic treatment. For example, one paper conclusion was reported as "There is some evidence that homeopathic treatment is more effective than placebo" without immediate warning. "However, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials, the high methodological quality is more likely to be negative than low quality research.
See also
- Cherry cutters
- The Darwin quote problem in Evicted
- FactCheck.org
- Prooftext
- Recontextualization
- Taliban Ads And
- Half-truth
Note
Further reading
- Boller, Paul F., Jr. (1967). Trust: Use and Abuse of Citation for Polemic and Other Purposes . Southern Methodist University Press. ISBN: 978-1-161-40918-5.
External links
- Definition of the dictionary context in Wiktionary
- Sound is off: Blogger against 'context', The Guardian Theater Blog, guardian.co.uk
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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