On the validity of a heavily contradicted outlier

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Mr. Oragahn
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On the validity of a heavily contradicted outlier

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Sep 20, 2010 1:46 pm

Still looking at the SBC thread on SW weapon yields, I've read this post from Rama:
Rama wrote:
Jared wrote:Your whole position boils down to, "No amount of examples, no matter what they show, means anything, because the ICS is Super Canon." Whatever floats your boat, dude. You can watch/read Star Wars stories and see teratons being thrown around all the time, clearly your imagination is greater than mine. In a way, I suppose I should envy you.
That's not his position. At all. In any point of this thread. Ever. So please don't attempt to take the moral high ground by deliberately misconstruing his argument.
What he's saying is thus:

(A) - C-canon is all conclusive, which means that fifteen sources that state one particular yield for turbolasers does not de-canonize, retcon or outweigh one other source. Canon does not work that way.

(B) - However Leo has not at any one point stated a preference for Saxton's work, only that the examples that you've bought up in an attempt to de-canonize the ICS (as if you would have any authority to do so) blatantly contradict the highest canon authority; the films themselves.

Turbolasers that can reduce multi-meter chunks of iron to a gaseous soup within a fraction of a second would be more than sufficient at destroying a house (more like a thousand houses within a two kilometer radius), they would have turned that temple and the surrounding forest into a glassy crater and that mountain fortress would have been a smoking pile of slag within a matter of hours.
Aside from the ridiculous nitpicking in point B in the difference between an open statement and crystal clear implication, it's point A that's quite telling.

For emphasis:

C-canon is all conclusive, which means that fifteen sources that state one particular yield for turbolasers does not de-canonize, retcon or outweigh one other source. Canon does not work that way.

The way LFL handles SW's all encompassing canon policy is that for particular problems (and the works tainted by Saxton make quite a huge one now), versus debates does operate differently.
Vs debaters are asked to follow the canonical principles by default (although a thread's OP can change them). They do.
But they also know that errors can be canonical.

The canon policy is actually a tool, and it hands the methodology used to sort the right from the wrong. For example, an contradiction between A and B, with B belonging to the EU and A belonging to the movies, will be, by the rules of canon, dealt with as the data from B being ignored and, at best, altered in ways to fit with A. When such is not possible, B is to be purely ignored.

Now does B stop existing from the canon? No. But the rules tell us how to handle such issues.

The point made by Rama is quite dishonest and pretty much the substance behind Leo's argument, as it's used by others, i.e. "the ICS is canon too bad for you".

Yet, how could these debaters forget that when 15 sources unilaterally contradict a 16th one, the versusdom always ignore the outlier?
When the contradiction is firm, no matter how canonical an element may be, vs debaters will simply dismiss it in favor of the norm, because we look for a continuity, for a coherence, and you can't have coherence if you stretch the elements of an universe so much that one paints a totally different story.

So... decanonize? No, indeed.
Retcon? Depends on how it's handled, and even if the SW canon policy doesn't seem to pay attention to the dates as much as Halo's canon policy does for example, it's always been heavily implied.
Outweigh? Yes, definitely. 15 sources all firmly contradicting a 16th one, if you don't call that outweighing, you're delusional.

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