I agree, Mr. Wiencek. The DNA excluded the Carrs from paternity of Eston.
But what I call the Carr exclusion fallacy is the belief that the DNA excluded the Carrs from paternity of _any_ Hemings child. In fact, the DNA said nothing whatsoever about the paternity of any Hemings child except Eston.
The fallacy pops up regularly. I suspect it's often used innocently, by people who just haven't thought carefully.
In my view it's fine -- and for all I know, it's correct -- to judge on historical-evidence grounds that no Carr fathered any Hemings child. But it is flat outright false to claim that DNA science has proven that historical judgment.
Whether innocent or deliberate, the Carr exclusion fallacy is a way of invoking the special authority of science for what is only a historical interpretation. If you ask me, the public deserves to know what science has and has not proven in the Hemings-TJ matter. The public deserves to know which findings come from lab analyses, and which from historians' analyses.
And as we know, the editors of Nature -- the world's leading science forum -- disrespected that principle egregiously, in my view causing the whole 13-year brouhaha that's now re-igniting.
All those editors had to do was
* insert the article "A" at the start of that famously false headline on the DNA report, "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child," and
* withhold the plain falsehoods that they tacked onto the Ellis-Lander explanatory essay -- one in a caption, the other in the subheadline.
Next to those abuses of the special authority of science, the Carr exclusion fallacy is minor.
But it's not nothing.
You might recall that we once had a big discussion in this forum about the Carr exclusion fallacy, though no one was calling it back then by that name.
Steve Corneliussen
Sep 1, 2011 01:53:47 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
Mr. Corneliussen --
Unless I am mistaken, the DNA test did prove that the Carrs did NOT
father Eston Hemings.
Henry Wiencek
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Steven T. Corneliussen
wrote:
. . . some might remember that I've criticized,for example, paternity
believers who report falsely -- but I hope only unwittingly -- that
the DNA evidence excluded the Carr brothers from paternity of any
Hemings child.
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