The best I can make of this line of argumentation is that you are pointing to the practicality for any mortal to choose which problems to work on, and that problems with a lot of evidence to pore over will be predicatbly attractive. Fine. That's what attracts you, it seems. Interesting problems that few people are working on will also be attractive to some people. If allowed to do so, a balance will probably emerge, loosely coordinating the community's efforts.When I say we cannot ask certain questions of certain types of data I meant that we cannot meaningfully ask certain questions.
And that, by the way, is why I am interested in the collective performance of communities as a whole, and not only in the individual performances of each community member. Division of labor provably allows the realized productivity of a coordinated whole to exceed the sum of the potential productivities of its uncoordinated parts.
(There are also less happy collective phenomena, like the personnel analog to "Gresham's Law." That may help to explain phenomena like the emergence of guild behavior in some specialized domains. Who knows? That might help bust up the guild.)
Anyway, back to free questioning. For example, I read what purports to be a letter from Paul, and while doing so, I take an interest in whether or not Paul's Adam was a real person. Hakeem has raised that question in a nearby post. That is, was Paul's Adam literally the first human being, singular?
As it happens, I know that the answer to that question is no ("know" meaning that I estimate the contrary not to be seriously possible, despite being logically possible - like "WW II didn't happen").
I know this because that isn't how multicellular speciation works. In other words, I have reached the ultimate end-state of contingent confidence, and done so prioristically. Of course, how speciation works is supported by a mountain of evidence and a fair bit of mathematics. Its application to the historicity of Adam, however, is entirely prioristic.
Crucially, I need to assume that God didn't intervene twice to get my species started. I have zero evidence for that proposition, and I may be wrong. Many people disagree; Paul seems to be one of them. Mine is a prioristic belief.
If true, however, then combined with what the analyzed evidence shows about all speciation, then there was no Adam in Paul's sense. The only thing the evidence of Paul's letters contributes to that conclusion is to define the initial hypothesis space. Thanks, Paul.
So, in your recent example, maybe that's all the news story will end up contributing to whatever I learn about the figure's childhood, a definition of whose childhood I'm inquiring about. Or, if you prefer, the story allows me to identify reasonable questions while avoiding conversations with rocks about fish.
Note also that the way to solve the Adam problem was to leave the silo of historical method. The analyst left the study of the human past altogether, finding the answer by looking into fruit flies versus slime mold. Ah, there's the answer. (Of course, as soon as somebody did that, it became a bona fide part of the "study of the human past." Odd, therefore, that your experts in methodology don't seem to ponder domain-independent aspects of their enterprise. Carrier really does have a point.)
I am reading this in the early morning, and fortunately had finished my coffee. Neil, IRL, I do geneaology. I don't have much experience "asking of" rocks, but birth certificates? Oh, yeah, I know about them.We cannot meaningfully ask of a birth certificate when the person died.
Assuming I'm starting from your mention of a news article, I suddenly know the subject's date of death to within a century, and have a high confidence estimate to within a few decades. Plus, I now know where to start looking for a death certificate (since the existence of the birth certificate implies that the person spent at least part of his or her life somewhere and when vital statistics were maintained - which I didn't know until now).
How in the name of Godfrey, looking at any birth certificate, am I unreasonable to formulate the questions, Has this person died? If so, when and where? And, in the bargain, I am supposed to fail to apply such heuristics as "if you add 120 years to the birth year, then you have a true upper bound on the death year," with near- WW II level confidence.
I can't reasonably do that? Bull. Total and complete bull.