By Ian Bremer; https://goo.gl/LbifLd

There are currently many hilarious memes on missing negations in our Facebook timelines. But for me personally, this topic is associated with a frustrating experience I had recently. The memories are still painful. It’s the nightmare of any scholar. After having read my Hidden Criticism?, Larry Hurtado wrote me a very kind email – with one devastating observation. He pointed out that in the concluding sentence of the book, I had written (p. 160):

 “Despite the associated problems, we should, therefore, avoid this complex of questions [i.e., whether Paul critisized the Roman Empire in the subtext of his letters]  …”

Of course, I meant “we should NOT”!

Some might wonder whether I am now sympathetic with Trump’s explanation that he struggled with the “double negative” during the Helsinki press conference. And indeed, one might expect that in light of this horrendous blunder I have lost any trust in successful and reliable communication.

Fortunately, when the realisation of my mistake hit me, I had already written on ambiguous  negations in “Paul’s Triumph” (pp. 21-22). Thus, I knew that in everyday situations contextual factors already point us to the meaning that a speaker intends and that missing (and additional) negations are, therefore, most often no problem at all. (In fact, there are missing and additional negations in important literary works that have been overlooked by critics for centuries!)

And, in the end, my own experience with Hidden Criticism confirms this: I’ve never seen my book cited as evidence for why we should immediately drop the whole counter-imperial approach! And even if my ideas about how many careful readers my book might have had are probably far too optimistic, it is telling that it took two years after the publication that somebody even noticed the issue (and once having noticed it, Larry Hurtado was, of course, certain that I had forgotten a “not” in that sentence).

So what are we supposed to do with Trump’s claim in light of our own painfully obvious fallibility? Are we indeed willing to seriously consider his explanation? In what follows, I will do something that so far doesn’t seem to be a typical reaction: I will, despite brevity, seriously consider the possibility that he might be telling the truth and explore how one might decide whether or not this is actually the case.

Often, the immediate context of an utterance already clarifies the discourse meaning because it creates (in terms of Bayesian confirmation theory) a strong “prior-probability” for one of several theoretically possible meanings. The full sentence in my book reads:

“Despite the associated problems, we should therefore, avoid this complex of questions [despite its problems] but tackle it in the most methodologically sound way possible.

Note three things: First, the text I’ve but in brackets is confusing for the reader and thus already indicates that some corruption of the text might have occurred here at the final stage of copyediting (it should go without saying that this happened after my good friend Wayne Coppins had read through the manuscript). This sentence is, thus, actually quite typical for what oral communication looks like, a form of communication where corrections, additions, repetitions etc. are the rule. (For more on this, see Gansel and Jürgens, Textlinguistik and Textgrammatik [3^rd ed., 2009], chapter 6). Second, note what is said immediately before: “There is a risk of overinterpreting parallels. But the risk of overlooking important elements of Pauline thought by rejecting such a research project altogether is equally real.” The whole corrupted sentence thus is clearly intended (“therefore”!) as in inference from the description of this situation. (Cf. Heinrich von Siebenthal, Griechische Grammatik zum Neuen Testament, §334 and Duden §1787-1788.) And the “Despite”-phrase communicates a concessive idea to that conclusion that picks up – by means of “associated problems” – the earlier mentioned “risk of overinterpreting” – i.e. a possible argument for NOT continuing the research program. Third, and perhaps most importantly, note that the “but” introduces an adversative statement. My comment on the future for our discipline thus follows a Negativum-POSITIVUM-structure (on this, see Heinrich von Siebenthal, Griechische Grammatik zum Neuen Testament, §338 and Duden §1793-1799): one complex of events is referred to by both stating it explicitly and (as a supportive statement) by also mentioning the counterfactual alternative (narratologists call this “disnarrating” of events).

Especially with the third observation in mind, I would encourage you to now take a look at Trump’s full statement:

“So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the democratic national committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying? With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia.

I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone — just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails. So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that president Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Okay thank you.”

Pretend for a moment that the word “would” were missing from the text and ask yourself: to which meaning does the context point and, thus, what word would you expect at that place? Perhaps this already clarifies the issue for you… (check out Stephen Colbert’s methodologically sound analysis).

But perhaps you will also notice just how difficult it is to carry through a similar discourse analysis of these sentences. I personally have real problems understanding the intended semantic structure indicated by the two “but” clauses– even though the terms used in both cases (“server” and “confidence” and “both parties”) should (!) in theory give us enough “thematic” indications to understand the coherence of the text (cf., e.g., Heinrich von Siebenthal, GGNT, § 301 for a NT example and Gansel/Jürgens, Textlinguistik and Textgrammatik, pp. 40-42 in general). To be sure, this presupposes that there is indeed a coherent communicative intention behind the utterance as a whole (and even though this might surprise some, I think that there are indeed good text-linguistic reasons for maintaining this also in this case).

What then are we supposed to do in order to clarify the intended semantic-pragmatic structure of Trump’s statements, given that the connectors in the immediate literary context might not offer enough contextual clues for at least some of us?

In the case of my problematic sentence in Hidden Criticism, I think that, even without the factors I’ve mentioned already, the broader context would probably be sufficient for you to understand my intent. I am referring to things like the general line of argument of my book, paratextual factors such as the cover text, my statements in presentations etc. In Trump’s case this would include earlier statements on Russian meddling with the election on the one hand and on the reliability of the US intelligence services on the other hand.

And perhaps that’s what makes it so difficult to assess Trump’s statements as we normally decode contributions to everyday communications – and what has caused some political experts to exclaim in frustration that they know that Trump is lying but that they can’t prove it.

Note what I say in Paul’s Triumph (p. 22) in the context of describing the methodology of resolving the meaning of statements with problematic (here: additional) negations:

“If we do not know … the stance of a person on a specific issue, and he or she inserts an additional negation in an utterance, this will inevitably lead to a misunderstanding. Consider, for example, the utterance: ‘Nobody with any sense isn’t going.’ If a friend says this with regard to a party of which we know that he or she does not like it, we will even understand this Statement as indicating that reasonable people do not go there. However, if we are not familiar with the speaker (i.e., we have no syntagmatic/contextual indications) we will conclude that the person is affirming the appeal of that event, since the double negation is an appropriate choice for expressing this thought.”

I’ll say it with a wonderful German idiom: Ich denke, genau hier liegt der Hund begraben.

Christoph Heilig is the author of Hidden Criticism? (Fortress, 2017) and Paul’s Triumph (Peeters, 2017). This research has recently received the Mercator Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Additionally, he has co-edited (with J. Thomas Hewitt and Michael F. Bird) God and the Faithfulness of Paul: A Critical Examination of the Pauline Theology of N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2017). In his most recent project, he discusses the importance of “stories” and “narrative substructures” for understanding Paul’s letters.