Posted: Mar 29, 2019 4:26 pm
RealityRules wrote:MS2 wrote:As I say, 'parallels', or indeed 'meme-parallels', haven't been rigorously defined. So we don't know that there are 22 of them. (Indeed, if one person's definition is loose enough they could count a great many more; if it is a tight definition they could count considerably less.)
And for any given definition we don't know how many occurrences is significant. I guess it seems intuitive to you that 22 must be significant. But your intuition isn't necessarily correct.
It seems to me that for any two texts there may be a probable number of similarities that can be attributed to coincidence. But we don't know what that number is. Beyond that, there will be other reasons for similarities, just one of which is literary dependence (others being similar settings etc). The situation therefore is far more complex than simply counting parallels. (and I haven't even mentioned the question of the length of the texts, how the texts are selected etc!)
See .
Neither of those addresses any of my points. (Not surprisingly in the case of the first,as my points were made in response to it.)
The author, and apparently all those he cites, simply shares your acceptance that there is no need to define what constitutes a ‘parallel’ and shares your intuition that 22 such parallels must be significant.
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