Re: This shall be Salman Rushdie´s words (Spoiler????)!?

[Ken Hutchinson]

No: HPFGUIDX 156545

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "houyhnhnm102" <celizwh at ...> wrote:
>
> wynnleaf:
> 
> > I'm afraid, Neri, that you've set up a very common 
> > fallacy.  One of Rushdie's comments was basically, "[if] 
> > Snape is a villian, [then] Dumbledore's killed."  That's 
> > a very obvious conclusion and practically no one has ever 
> > argued against that.  If Snape is evil, he definitely 
> > killed DD.  But that being true, does not make the converse 
> > true.  In other words, the above being true does not in 
> > any way imply that if Dumbledore is really dead, Snape 
> > must be evil.  To consider that to be true is to fall 
> > for a very common fallacy, the Latin name of which I 
> > can't recall at the moment, but the basic construction 
> > is: If A then B, does NOT mean the same as If B then A.
> 
> houyhnhnm:
> 
> I don't know the Latin name either. "Converting a conditional" 
> is what it is called in English.
> 

I don't know about Latin either. I do know that in the branch of
mathematics called logic the following definitions are used:

statement:         if A then B
inverse:              if not A then not B
converse:           if B then A
contrapositive:   if not B then not A

In logic IF you can establish the truth of a statement its 
contrapositive will also ALWAYS be true. Likewise IF a statement
AND its inverse OR its converse can be shown to be true then
all four varients are true and A and B are in fact identical. 

The trouble with trying to apply logic to Rushdie's statement is
that the statement itself is false in general so no logical conclusions 
can be drawn from it. An evil Snape might have gone along with 
a DD plan to fake his death for some reason to be revealed in
book 7. The proposition that if Snape is a villian then DD is dead
is simply not true. Rowling has confirmed that DD is dead so 
thus endeth many fine theories but by itself this tells us nothing
about Snape's loyalties.

Rowling did say that Rushdie's opinion was correct. We can't know 
which part of Rushdie's rambling opinion she might have been 
referring to when she said this. She confirmed *something* that 
he said, but which something? I don't think that you can make too
much of the difference between an opinion and a theory because
it is too likely that in the heat of a real time discussion that Rowling
was not choosing her words that carefully. You might consider a 
theory to be just an informed opinion anyway.

Two things at the end of HBP seemed like possible tricks on the reader:
DD's "death" and Snape's "betrayal". If either one was a trick it seems
unlikely she would give them away at this point. Maybe she tripped up
but she is by now an experienced trickster and not easily tripped. By
telling us that the straightforward interpretation of DD's "death" is 
correct she is not giving away one of her tricks, she is telling us that 
we only imagined a trick where there was none. If she meant to say that
Snape is good and the straightforward interpretation of the ending of 
HBP is wrong then she *is* giving away one of her tricks and one that
she has played very close to her chest for 6 books. This seems very
unlikely, so I'm guessing that she was confirming the opinion that 
everything hinges on whether Snape is good or evil and  *not* the 
opinion that Snape is good.

Now that I've said that, just watch: She'll come out in the papers today
and say how flustered and embarrassed she is at having stumbled when
she revealed Snape's true character at the book reading!

Ken