On 4/3/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Apr 2, 2007, at 12:37 PM, John Lee wrote:
If there are no extant secondary sources, any interpretation whatsoever of the primary source is novel. I suppose one could argue for the face- value, literal meaning interpretation as non-novel, but it's suprising how often people can disagree on a literal reading of a source.
Well, yes and no. First of all, this is where talk pages become useful parts of our process. Second of all, there are cases, including in academia, where you have to allow for some slippage here. My usual example here is [[Jacques Derrida]]. There are hundreds of secondary sources on him, but the good ones are A) no easier to interpret than the primary sources, and B) POV to high hell about what it is his philosophy means. The accessible general overviews are of mediocre quality at best, and are far from respected by any important Derrida scholars.
Attempting to write an article primarily from secondary sources about Derrida is a doomed proposition.
The way to write a good Derrida article is to have a bunch of people who use Derrida's ideas in their own scholarship write up summaries of Derrida's thought, and have points of disagreement and tension (i.e. the points where people disagree on exactly what On Grammatology means right here) sourced to secondary sources and explained in an NPOV fashion.
This is important. The best way to write this article on a major philosopher who nobody would even think to nominate for deletion is from primary sources, using secondary sources only when needed.
(This was, it should be noted, how [[Michel Foucault]], a similar article, was written and became a featured article. No citations anywhere in the "Works" section aside from the implied citation to the primary sources. Damn good artlcle, and a great overview of Foucault's work. This should be a model.)
-Phil
But in this case, the secondary sources are in existence. If anyone wants to confirm that our reading of Derrida's or Foucault's works is non-novel, they can just slog through all the secondary sources. When there are no secondary sources available, however, then it's a whole different ball game: any interpretation of the primary sources is essentially novel, and thus verboten under NOR.
What I'm saying is, there's no reason we can't use primary sources if there are already secondary sources. It's silly not to use what's available. But if there are no secondary sources, how can we justify bringing up our own novel interpretation of the primary sources, and becoming a secondary source?
Johnleemk