On 3/21/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
If Darwin was responding to the work of others than
his book can no
longer be considered a primary source.
"Primary" and "secondary" refer to how information is used. And most
secondary sources become primary sources over time, anyway (Darwin's
_Origin_ is now taken less as a scientific work than as an artifact of
the 19th century evolutionary thought).
I think you have it all backwards. I do agree that
reading the original
is often much more difficult, and that secondary works fulfill a
simplifying function. But any secondary interpretation imposes
additional views, or creates distortions of the original material, or
begins the cherry-picking process.
Of course it does. The goal is that the *experts* should be the ones
doing the distortion and cherry-picking of the source material, not
the hundreds of thousands of Wikipedians. That's the point of WP:NOR.
Oh! It seems as though this approach only reinforces
the socally
acceptable POV.
It gives it primacy, yes. But that's the point of WP:NPOV. We're not a
place to launch theories, we are just a mirror.
What you are seeking is more than a simple
acknowledgement of the
difficulty of using primary sources. When you put this in terms of
patient explanations you are going much further and presuming him to be
wrong.
I don't quite follow you on this part. But if you're talking about the
courtroom analogy, it is just an analogy. The book itself, if you are
curious, is Joseph Dumit, "Picturing Personhood." It's quite good.
FF