The bullshit of Jonathan Poletti reaches a new low, on the Shroud of Turin

Poletti, who has a Medium site popular with what I'll call "edgy evangelicals,", people who promote "dudebro Christianity" or whatever, claims the Shroud of Turin artifact really is 2,000 years old and that a new study proves that.

My response? Expanded from what I posted on Medium:

Bullshit by Poletti reaches a new level, including a flat-out lie with the Fox News line of "I report, you decide" in your headline, you explicitly claimed it's 2,000 years old, which even your new study doesn't, hedging your bet.

Bullshit on the original and bullshit squared in your response to CA in comments. CA is right; the test is NOT designed to test the Shroud's age, and in fact, the way it's conducted, and framed, comes off as handwaving to try to get the gullible to ignore that it's not designed to test its age and to give the Shroud-grifters (anybody you know?) an ammunition head fake.

The testers also give away the game with their statements about presumed and required preservation history. Anybody who knows anything about Turin knows it gets well below 20C in winter and that damp medieval castles and cathedrals got and remained well below 20C for weeks at a time without central heating. Humidity could also have gone well above 75 percent.

As for getting about 22.5C? Erm, there's this fire that burned the shroud that the authors (refuse to call them "researchers" as they're not) conveniently ignore.

(The original pseudo-research presumes the shroud was kept consistently between 20-22.5C and 55-75 percent humidity.)

Poletti admits the fire, and flooding as well, which would have pushed the shroud above 75 percent humidity. 

More specifically, here's their claim:

Moreover, it is interesting to point out that our analysis has shown that, in order for the TS fabric to be about 20 centuries old, it should have necessarily been kept at an average secular temperature of about 22.5 ± 0.5 °C and an average relative humidity of 55 ± 5% for 13 centuries preceding the XIV century. From Equation (5), it follows that if the average relative humidity was of the order of 75 ± 5%, to obtain the same value of the measured natural aging of 0.60 ± 0.02 for the TS sample, the average secular room temperature should be about 20.0 ± 0.5 °C. Therefore, from our WAXS characterization it follows that we have a range of allowed secular average room temperatures of 20.0–22.5 °C, correlated with a range of average relative humidity values of 75–55%, as climate constraints, for the TS to be a 20-centuries-old relic. These physical constraints on the secular average room temperature and the average relative humidity, obtained by measuring the natural aging of the cellulose of the TS sample, here realized through WAXS characterization, could help historians test their hypotheses throughout the possible locations in the world and historical periods in which the TS could have been kept during the 13 centuries before its documented history in Europe.

And, we know that the shroud was NOWHERE NEAR that well preserved on this tight of a temperature and humidity range.

Oh, "appears to be Jewish" means nothing. I "appear to be Jewish" because of what a hospital doctor did days after I was born. So that's a bullshit framing line, Poletti. As for details of why it might "look Jewish"? Per the Wiki link, probably because it's a deliberate forgery, and modern researchers have shown how it could have been done.

Back to the Fox News line of "I report, you decide," Poletti.

It comes off as an oxymoron, but will you be honest enough to admit you lied?

I already know the answer and it's "he won't."

He's an evangelical evangelizing doorknob. I've argued with him before but never busted him in a flat-out lie. 

And, hypocritical in that, if he's following the Calvinist version of the Ten Commandments, the shroud at least approaches being a graven image. It certainly is the spirit of one. It's an idol. That's especially true with it not only being a medieval creation, but — as recognized in that era, no less! — it likely being a medieval forgery.

==

But, the authors not researchers are themselves liars with the heading of their study, too: "X-ray Dating of a Turin Shroud’s Linen Sample." The study itself doesn't claim to actually date anything, once you look past the handwaving.

And, there's lies in their full study text:

Moreover, other dating methods agree in the assignment of the TS to the first century AD [5,10,11,12]. Spectroscopic methods, based on Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy/Attenuated Total Reflectance [10] and Raman spectroscopy [11], date the Shroud to 300 Before Christ (BC) ± 400 years and 200 BC ± 500 years, respectively. The mechanical multi-parametric method, based on an analysis of five parameters, including the breaking load and Young’s modulus and the loss factor, after an adequate calibration based on the results of two dozen samples of known age, dates TS as 400 AD ± 400 years old [12]. Estimates of the kinetic constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin suggest that TS has an age range from 1300 to 3000 years [5]. A recent numismatic analysis [13] proposes that TS was already present in 692 AD.

Bullshit.

Let's quote Wikipedia in response:

After years of discussion, the Holy See permitted radiocarbon dating on portions of a swatch taken from a corner of the shroud. Independent tests in 1988 at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology concluded with 95% confidence that the shroud material dated to 1260–1390 AD. .... The most recent analysis (2020) concludes that the stated date range needs to be adjusted by up to 88 years in order to properly meet the requirement of "95% confidence".

And add this from a separate piece on radiocarbon dating of the Shroud:

Despite some technical concerns that have been raised about radiocarbon dating of the Shroud,[5][6] no radiocarbon-dating expert has asserted that the dating is unreliable.[7]

Period and end of story. People working at some crystallography institute are grasping at straws.

Let's also note these are all native Italians. This underscores my contention that while formal church-going religiosity may be much lower in Western Europe than the US, non-structural religiosity is still pretty high there.

Finally, per Wiki's article on it, wide-angle X-ray scattering is not a scientific dating tool.

I also see, per Wiki's link on radiocarbon dating, that this is NOT the first time Sgr. Giulio Fanti has promoted Shroud bullshit. And, not the first time he's engaged in scientifically iffy methodology as part of this. Oh, and publishing your findings at places like the London School of Economics and Political Science also undermines you.

Fanti has also claimed to be able to date the shroud with infrared light, Live Science notes. So, if that was so perfect in 2013, why did you need to do it again with WAXS? Oops. And, because it of course needs to be said, infrared light is not a scientific dating tool. (Let's note that he self-references in the new study, to this study, when claiming that previous studies confirm a circa 2,000 year old date. Also note that he uses wiggle room by saying it's around this time — lest anybody accuse him of doing exactly what he's doing, namely, stacking the deck.)

And, Fanti is ALSO listed at another Wiki piece on "fringe theories about the Shroud of Turin." And, he's been called out for that bullshit.

Cur alii, non alii? Thoughts outside theology

 Medieval Christian theology used this phrase, as modern theologians know — "why some, not others" for the so-called "mystery of salvation."

So, why do some people go to hell despite the "loving arms" of a dual-omni, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, deity? Catholics noted god's acting first in grace, but cite "prevenient grace," that is, god foreseeing receptivity in some humans. Orthodox are broadly similar. The Protestant Reformers rejected that. Calvin ultimately took the logical road of double predestination, later rejected by Jacob Arminius in the Netherlands, whose teachings seeped into Methodism, and basically, most modern American evangelical Protestantism, which tries to avoid the issue of "election" by god or not in general. Luther went with the illogical single predestination, not wanting to blame god for sending some people to hell, but refused to accept the truth that not to choose is itself a choice.

(If you're a believer in Eastern religions, re getting through karma, it's no mystery at all; you simply didn't do enough. If you're an Orthodox Jew, it's basically a mix of not doing enough and not professing the Shema and understanding Yahweh correctly. If you're a traditional Muslim? Oops; kismet is just kicking the ball down the road like Christian doctrine.)

"Cur alii, non alii" can be applied to things both serious and frivolous outside of Christian election and salvation. 

For example, why does some of the white working class allegedly (I said ALLEGEDLY) vote its interest by voting Democrat (ALLEGEDLY supporting workers, but more and more, nationally helmed by neoliberals who ignore things like unionization when not actively helping oppose union drives) rather than voting Republican, as many now do? (Actually, with the second ALLEGEDLY parenthesis, this one isn't a total mystery.)

For me, there's something else.

"Cur alii, non alii" on addiction and sobriety.

Why do some people who have long-term addiction problems, whether to illicit drugs, scrips, or alcohol (I'm setting nicotine aside due to the power of its physical/chemical addiction), who know, and admit to others, that they have such problems, who know that moderation of their chemical use isn't working for them, who have had social or even legal problems due to this, and who are seeking help from sobriety programs and/or counselors, "not get it"?

Why don't they stay sober after a certain amount of time, especially if they get past the first weeks and physical cravings are gone? (Most drugs both licit and illicit do not have that high of a physical addiction threshold. Psychological addiction is another story.)

Have they not totally self-elected, that is, have they, whether consciously or subconsciously (and I believe it's a choice even when subconscious) not "locked in" this decision?

Yes, there are "reasons" that sobriety gets challenged. But? Some people stay sober even through these challenges, including sheer boredom. Others do not.

In the world of addiction, some people have extra challenges, such as mental health issues such as depression or bipolar disorder; others have backgrounds of abusive childhoods. Yet, within the same backgrounds, some people attain, achieve and hold onto sobriety, and others do not. Cur alii, non alii? 

Back to the political world. Hardcore conservatives can, reportedly, learn new thinking tricks. Just get them to stop watching Fox for a month. That said, does the effect stick? Both the effect of being better critical thinkers, and what caused it — not watching Fox. There are plenty of "90 day wonders" in the sobriety world, after all. And, on the Fox watchers, people were paid to watch CNN, which means it's nowhere near a double-blinded study, and therefore, of little value. Whether paid or not for saying they were better at critical thinking, the participants who watched CNN might have said that for the researchers' benefit. Cur alii, non alii?

At some point, per any great matter of human psychology, per Yeshua bar Yusuf, one has to preach to the lost, and "catechize" them afterward. Those who still leave themselves an out, an escape hatch, know where to return to.

Top blogging of January-March

 Unlike at my primary blog, I don't post here enough to do a roundup of top blogging, by readership, monthly.

Quarterly, though, yes.

So, let's dive in. (Note: Not all blog posts may be from the last three months; these are just the most popular.)

"'No true empiricist' ... like 'no true Scotsman'?" — my callout of Julian Baggini over David Hume, was No. 1.

No. 2? "Only Sky is getting shit wrong already." The successor to the atheist and agnostic bloggers of Patheos did little to impress me in the first month of its formation.

No. 3? I noted how the Westar Institute, the successor to the Jesus Seminar, had taken itself totally in academic and intellectual tank in a new book.

No. 4? "Baruch Espinoza remains excommunicated." No, really, he DOES, at the Amsterdam synagogue that tossed him centuries ago.

No. 5? More on the hypocrisy of Hume, this time as a psychologist.

No. 6? I had to laugh at the claim that in our minds, we don't think in any language. As it turns out? The piece had plenty to laugh at.

No. 7? From last year, my refutation of Jesus mythicists' claims that Nazarath didn't exist in the first century CE still trends.

No. 8? An old post about old libertarian pseudoskeptics like Brian Dunning and Michael Shermer will never get old.

No. 9? I remain glad I said goodbye to History for Atheists and its Catholic and papal apologist pseudo-atheist author.

No. 10? My callout of St. Anthony of Fauci for his Platonic noble lies (I later had follow-ups) remains popular.

Hume the not-so-great psychologist; once again a hypocrite?

A Twitter back-and-forth with Julian Baggini over various things David Hume has led me to in part question Hume's value as arguably the world's first modern psychologist. His "I can't apprehend myself" sounds so true when one tries to make an instantaneous grasp of who Hume is, as if the mind has a certain quasi-quantum fuzziness that can't be precisely held, or, to riff on both Anaximander and Zeno of Elea, as if it's a river which is always flowing halfway further to its destination while also never the same river.

The reality is that the "self" is a corpus of work, not a moment. To go back to the quantum world analogy, it's the entire diffraction pattern, not one individual wave-particle duad. 

Let's note his (in)famous comment in full:

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

The first thing I thought of when reading this again after hunting it up to get the exact quote?

The story about Hume being asked about the Problem of Induction by a lady, who wondered how he could fall asleep at night not knowing whether or not the sun would rise in the morning.

And, Hume essentially said, "I act as if."

Well, there's the hypocrisy part. Per what I said about the self being an ongoing corpus of work? Hume certainly did "act as if" in his personal life (other than when denying he wrote the Treatise). So, by his actions, if not his statement at the moment, he accepted the other side of the claim, not his own.

Of course, to further the petard-hoisting? The quote IS, as Hume students know ... from the Treatise! The book that Hume claimed he didn't write!

That said, the "bundle theory" behind this has its own additional problems. If all we can know about an object is a bundle of impressions, how can we know that that bundle of impressions is all we can know about it? To quote Hume against himself, the assumption that he makes could be called "divinity or school metaphysics" and another of his (in)famous quotes applied against himself:

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

Beyond that, Hume arguably stacked the deck, and for this we head back to quantum mechanics.

Maybe I can't see "particle X," but I can see the vapor trail left by its decay products and see if they match what's predicted. Likewise, maybe I can't see the self, but I can hear or see you state your political beliefs, your philosophical beliefs, your religious beliefs, your preferences in food and many other things.

These often do not stay rigid over a lifetime. The self of 20 years from now will likely not be the same as that of today, and the self of 20 years ago likely is not the same as the current one. (Example for me? As I write this, I think more and more that Hume needs to be shelved on the "overrated philosophers" list; 20 years ago, I couldn't conceive that.)

That said, the self of three months from now will likely be pretty close to the same as the self of today, close enough to be considered the same self, barring a Damascus Road moment. (Or a belief in p-zombies or something.) 

The problem gets worse. Most of Hume's highlights in philosophy, such as the whole Problem of Induction, started in the Treatise. It's true that he reworked some of them in some degree in later works. Nonetheless, if we took Hume's fictive anonymity claims as face value real, we should throw out what, one-third of philosophical thought attributed to him? And, that would officially move him into my "overrated philosophers" list.

So, again, as with Kant, Hume, or an overestimation of Hume, has awakened me from dogmatic slumbers.

'No true empiricist' ... like 'no true Scotsman'?

First, sorry that I hadn't posted in a couple of weeks. But, late last week, I got easy material for two more posts, both long reads, and both about my "favorite" subject of the last year.

That's a shaggy dog, if you will, in that header.

I don't know if Baggini is Scots or not, but David Hume of course was, as well as being an empiricist. Was he a "true" empiricist? Is making claims about "true empiricists" today presentism? And, what other cans of worms have been opened up? 

Let's dive in.

Baggini, in a back and forth on Twitter about whether he cuts David Hume too much slack on his racism (he does, I say), made this claim:

I'd like to see your reasons for disagreeing. (Well, only a bit, because time is short.) He was at root an empiricist, and no empiricist would be racist today.

— Julian Baggini (@JulianBaggini) March 4, 2022

To which I independently Tweeted:

Julian Baggini claims no empiricist would be racist today. Are IQ test results empiricist? Charles Murray notes racial differences in them, says sociological factors don't cause them. So, wrong, Baggini, and no, I'm not directly responding to your Tweets anymore.

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) March 4, 2022

What Baggini seems to be claiming is that science, philosophy. or both, are free of bias. Anybody who's read the Great Barrington Declaration knows that's laughable.

Besides, if empiricism is free of bias today, why wasn't it so in Hume's lifetime?

Erm, isn't this presentism? I'll neglect to say anything about petards. https://t.co/cP21ym12pr

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) March 4, 2022

Oops! Baggini, as he has with Hume, is trying to use the hand-waving of presentism, and I just hoist him by his own petard.

Yeah.... I quote-tweeted his tweet rather than doing a second independent response in a thread to my first tweet. So sue me.

And, he responded, claiming the petard's on me. 

"Presentism is a historical term meaning judging past actions by today's standards, or uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts." The petard is all yours.

— Julian Baggini (@JulianBaggini) March 5, 2022

So, NOT quote tweeting him, my final take:

"Presentism is a historical term meaning judging past actions by today's standards, or uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes...."
Baggini (NOT quote tweeting) HAS, in claiming no modern empiricist would be racist, staked out uncritical adherence to present attitudes.

— TheRealSocraticGadfly: Friends Crushes Xi Jinping (@real_gadfly) March 5, 2022

I.E., I stand by what I said. M-W's shorter definition confirms me in that.

That said, from what I've read elsewhere, I think that Baggini, like Dan Kaufman, gets Hume's Skeptical history wrong.

Simple and correct answer on this is by straight chronology: Treatise Hume, a Pyrrhonist; post-Treatise Hume an Academic. Per Mossner's bio, as I noted in my review, that's why Hume's bottom line recourse when being called out as a Pyrrhonist was to saiy, "I didn't write the Treatise."

In reality, this, combined with my noting that Hume was a "trimmer" in many ways, which Baggini halfway admits in one piece, though without ever using the word "trimmer," shows that Hume as a philosopher should perhaps be moved into the overrated camp.

It also brings into question Hume's value as arguably the world's first modern psychologist. His "I ca't apprehend myself" sounds so true when one tries to make an instantaneous grasp of who Hume is, as if the mind has a certain quasi-quantum fuzziness that can't be precisely held, or, to riff on both Anaximander and Zeno of Elea, as if it's a river which is always flowing halfway further to its destination while also never the same river.

The reality is that the "self" is a corpus of word, not a moment. To go back to the quantum world analogy, it's the entire diffraction pattern, not one individual wave-particle duad.

Finally, Julian, another petard? If Hume IS a "thorough" racist as you claim (and as I agree, while still noting you undercut yourself), then can you really write a whole book about how Hume can teach us about being human? ONLY if in terms of medieval theology's "via negativa." (And, that wouldn't just be on Hume as a negative mirror on how to not be a racist. It would also be Hume as a negative mirror on how not to be a poseur, a trimmer and other things.)

==

More here on Hume's racism, which also notes that Hume believed in polygenesis.

Westar/Jesus Seminar goes in the tanks

 At one time, what seems eons ago, the Jesus Seminar did great stuff. The work of John Kloppenborg et al on Q, including its reconstruction, likely early forms, etc., was fantastic.

After that, even though a bit of the derision was earned, the four-color vote on alleged saying of Jesus was pretty good overall.

The gospels based on that weren't bad, though already then, the Seminar was starting to enter the world of clunky/wonky/idiosyncratic in its choices on translation.

Between moving away from the Metroplex more than a decade ago and shifts in focus in my non-fiction reading life, I hadn't read anything from the Seminar, now the Westar Institute. Until recently, and with this book, I shan't be reading anything else in the future for another decade.

Adapted from my Goodreads review:

After Jesus, Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements by Erin Vearncombe
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I have enough familiarity with Westar/Jesus Seminar etc. that I wasn’t holding my breath over this book, BUT?

It’s as bad as Bart Ehrman’s recent stuff. No, ultimately it’s worse. And, much of the second half of it is basically a channeling of Karen L. King, without disclosing her own willfulness in setting herself up as a mark for a forgery.

Add in tendentious theological, exegetical and hermeneutic claims, the lack of an index and more, and this is one-star dreck.  

First, claiming that because  σοφία is feminine in Greek this opens “new ways of looking at Jesus” is laughable. (Ditto for חָכְמָה being feminine in Hebrew, of course.) I immediately thought of Mark Twain saying that a maiden is sexless in German but a turnip is not.

Claims that Rome has a focus on making conquered nations feel like semi-barbarians by violence? The Republic had a long period of forbearance with Greece, and even elsewhere, worked to co-opt the leadership class, not crush them. Slaves “transported” to Rome? Sure, because that’s where the most rich people were. Rome did NOT have an Assyria-like policy of deliberately moving whole groups of people.

People moving for work? Sure. Happens today! Uncoerced today as it was then.

The “Roman soldiers” Jesus and John the Baptizer talked to? Syrian auxiliaries, actually.

Gets Markan version of “clean and unclean foods” parable wrong! Humor isn’t the point; equality of Gentiles is.

Gets the “betrayed” vs “arrested” of Paul on the Last Supper wrong, or just ignores the “arrested” to try to offer more cosmic meaning.

Pharisees weren’t “relatively new” at time of Josephus., not with a pedigree of more than 200 years.

Insinuates pre-69 Vespasian already had an eye for the throne. Really? NEVER heard that before. Also claims Vespasian was a “plebian.” WRONG! He was a knight, the equestrian class.

Also a lie re Vespasian, and Titus? The claims that Romans never destroyed temples of other religions. It wasn't "temples," but in 54 CE Suetonius Paulinus (not the historian) is reported as destroying many Druid sacred sites in Britain, on Anglesey, as part of a brutal suppression. Druid groves were destroyed elsewhere.

Weirder yet is the talk about some Christian subgroups, like claiming that Hebrews 13:9-16 is about a subgroup that called itself “the altar.” No, really.

Claiming I Peter 1:1 and James 1:1 is about Christians who were “aliens,” rather than, as is the common interpretation, that it refers to the Jewish diaspora, or perhaps what was already considered a Christian diaspora, is ... interesting. But, if you’re going to date I Peter at 150CE, you’ll make such statements! (Personally, I can see I Peter as being as late as 125, and the persecution it references being what Pliny the Younger discusses with Trajan. It’s possible it refers to earlier bits of persecution under Diocletian.)

Of course, if you’d like to date 1 Peter as late as 150 to put it later than Gnostic writings, you’ll do that!

That said, there are somewhat refreshing ideas, such as calling groups of Christians in different cities “clubs,” like dyers or weavers. Or like followers of pagan gods. That said, it seems to go too far to even take the Pauline passage about “one God and Father of us all” as “the father of the club.” And, that was the only halfway good thing here.

Translating “Christians” as “followers of the Anointed” when they note that Roman religious and political tradition didn’t have anointing, although Greek did. (Herms in the ancient Greek world, for example, were anointed.) Then claiming that Christiani/-oi as used in Latin (or imperial Greek?) was an official imperial term? Again, a claim I've never heard before, and comes off as theologically and hermeneutically tendentious.

Yes, “βαπτίζω” can mean to wash or to bathe. Qumran shows this. BUT, these were still ceremonial washings, even if we don’t use the word “baptize” as a transliteration. (Interestingly, Christian “baptisms” are compared to those of Isis etc., but Qumran isn’t referenced.)

“Gnostic” may not be exactly right, but a Nag Hammadi work such as Testimony of Truth shows that there were differences between so-called Gnostiicism and early pre-orthodox Christianity. Note how it refers to the Lord threatening Adam and Eve with death for seeking gnosis. Strawmans Gnostic vs proto-orthodox division without noting schools within Gnosticism and how most scholars talk about these sehools, or “heresies!”

Also cites Karen King without noting the big kerfuffle over Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, namely, her being a sucker for a forgery. Beyond the link above, someone as far left politically as Chris Hedges also ripped it to shreds. And, the authors about “Secret Revelation of John” rather than normal academic title “Apocryphon of John” was puzzling. At the same time, Hedges rants as much here about "postmodernism" as he does elsewhere about "Gnu Atheists." (Those are reference quotes, not scare quotes.)

Then, near the end, getting into what we’ll call traditional biblical scholarship, the authors accept the traditional authorship of I Clement and Ignatius, even though good traditional scholarship of the last 50 years rejects it more and more. (I think that if you date I Clement much after 100, you have to call it a forgery even if a real Clement existed. I've recently talked about Ignatius, and Marcion, per three paragraphs down.)

And, OTHER problems. I’ve NEVER seen Hegesippus spelled with a double-s before.

And, in discussing early martyrdom, the authors never wrestle with Candida Moss. (That’s probably because it would undercut their take on traditional Xianity not being in opposition to Gnosticism.)

Dates the Pastorals post-Marcion, also on tendentious grounds.

Finally, there’s no index to this book. That normally costs a star by itself and sealed the one-star rating.

View all my reviews

We don't thnk in any language, eh?

"Tosh" is my British English, thought-out answer to a clickbaity piece at 3 Quarks Daily that leaves me with not so high regard for its author and the seemingly impoverished view of what human thought is.

David J. Lobina does claim, in his title that "You don't think in any language."

First, it's clickbaity in two ways. One, that clickbait header does get caveated in the third paragraph, but that doesn't make it less clickbaity.

The point I want to make in this post is that no-one thinks in any natural language; not in English, or Italian, or whatever, but in a language of thought, an abstract, unconscious and moreover inaccessible, conceptual representational system of the mind.

Nope. Last I checked, a "language of thought" is still a language.

The study the author mentions? he limitations of one person's native language vs another I don't think is strong proof of his idea; at best, it's proof that a strong version of Sapir-Whorf is no more true for inner speech than talking to others.

Beyond that, doesn't he later engage in petard hoisting with:

And this, I have claimed, necessitates a mental language of a special kind, the language of thought I introduced last month and which I have elaborated upon a little bit here.

So, again we DO speak in a language! Not just any of the external languages. Author Lobina, or whoever wrote the headline, is then wrong. And, doing this more than once? I'm not inclined any longer to be charitable about "caveating." He's either written an egregious clickbait header or else he's blithely engaged in petard hoisting.

And, per above, I still say he's wrong otherwise on the broader issue.

Also, because thought for humans doesn't end with inner speech or cogitation, but goes on to include conscious dialogue with others, then ruminating on the ideas they provide, that also undercuts the idea that we don't think in any language. 

This isn't quite a category mistake. It is a mistake, though; it's an impoverished definition of the word "thinking," even as I silently talk to myself while typing here. a lot of theories of mind and consciousness postulate that a lot of human cogitation, development of not just second order, but third order theories of mind, etc., depend on internal self dialogue .... which is based on language.

But, they also depend on dialogue with others. Whether Aristotle's "Man is an animal of civilization," or Donne's "No man is an island," while we occasionally cogitate alone, ultimately, our thinking is fashioned within social discourse.

So, no, Mr. Lobina, I shan't stick around for Part 4 or whatever of your essay serious.

And, with all of that, with the references to Aristotle and Donne, and per discussion about this in a private Facebook group? Maybe it IS a category mistake after all, and, speaking of language and thinking, I'm not sure yet how to describe the miscategorization.

I do know one other thing, to trot out another philosopher. That's Dan Dennett and private mental states. It's arguable that Lobina has no basis for his analogizing from natural language to mental language — with the addendum that he gets funnier yet by interjecting the language of formal logic into all of this.

In this case, it's not petard hoisting, but trying to have ones cake and eat it too, on talking about private mental states via analogy to public ones.

Or, to trot out a better analogy? A digital camera may use a CMOS or other sensor instead of film, but both it and the film camera are making photographs with photons of light. Thought may ultimately be done at an unconscious level in something like a language, without us being able to analogize better than that, but that something like a language bases its thinking on natural language and the product of natural language