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The Mind of the Quote-miner

It should be no secret that I consider quote-mining to be one of the most pernicious offenses one can commit.

Joshua Zelinsky, at Religion, Sets, and Politics, had a post a few days ago that brought out a point that I hadn't given enough consideration to:

Why do people engage in quote mines? Many people who have discussed this issue think that quote mines are attributable to malice and deliberate dishonesty.  This view is inaccurate. While some quote-mines may be due to dishonesty, there are three causes which are more common: poor reading comprehension, sloppiness, and differing epistemological premises. This last is the least well-recognized cause of quote mining.

In short, someone may quote-mine because he assumes it's a legitimate thing to do.  They may have been taught expressly or by example that lifting passages out of context doesn't destroy the meaning or intent of the text.

I can accept this as an explanation, but not as an excuse. 

Joshua's example, from Ch. 6 of On the Origin of Species, is an case where the author (Charles Darwin, in this case) used a rhetorical question to set up for subsequent discussion.  In the mined form, removed from the surrounding context, it gives the impression of saying exactly the opposite of the idea it was being used to convey. 

Now, it's one thing for someone to throw a quote like that out on the table and assert that "Darwin couldn't figure out how natural selection could have formed an eye", particularly if they've never seen the passage in context and are merely repeating something that they've been told.  However,  the moment that the full context is provided and it becomes clear that Darwin most certainly had an idea of how an eye could have evolved, the initial assertion must be retracted.  Any other response is, at best, intellectually dishonest.

I'm not going to say much else about this at the moment - Joshua did a great job discussing it at length - but I wanted to get the subject back on the table since it's directly relevant to some posts I have in-work for the next few weeks.

CB

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