[WikiEN-l] Primary sources

[Fastfission]

And an easy way to even get around it is to make it an instance of
reported speech.

"Joe wrote in his diary that he saw the ghost" -- let the reader parse
out, if they want, whether he was just being silly or not. If Joe
happens to be someone whose belief in spiritualism is important to
state explicitly (i.e., Alfred Russel Wallace), then it is likely a
secondary source has already commented on it.

FF

On 3/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/17/06, Jonathan <dzonatas at dzonux.net> wrote:
> > And point C seems like the hard one to determine. If it is not hard, it
> > is at least contentious. For example, let's say there is a statement in
> > a primary source that says:
> >     Joe said he saw the ghost.
> >
> > The article then uses that as a source and changes it to state:
> >     Joe believes in ghosts.
> >
> > It might be true, but it seems like an interpretation based on the
> > possibility that Joe might have actually lied despite his belief in
> > ghosts or not.
>
> This kind of interpretation is perfectly acceptable imho. If there's
> no particular reason to think that Joe lied (ie, he didn't say so the
> next day), then using words like "believes" or "thinks" is not
> contentious. Occasionally a little unclear, particularly if the
> person's current beliefs are unclear, but that's more a question of
> style than an application of NOR. Similar kind of deal if you say
> "Joe, angry about the lack of consultation, believed he had been
> misled", when your source says something like "Joe said yesterday,
> "Those bastards told me they weren't going to do anything without
> asking me, but they screwed me over".
>
> My example isn't very well worded, but I'm trying to show that you can
> deduce "angry" from the colourful language, and "believed" as a
> convention for "said that he thought".
>
> Steve
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