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Re: May 14th 1940 and few little things
Thanks, Juha. I consider this as consent with my proposed strategy to deal with the matter. You propose increased clarity, which is exactly what I'm after.
You raise three issues, to which I would like to respond as follows:
1. The paragraph 3. you propose is in fact present in my paragraph 2, after the comma. I am not interested in the total number of accounts produced by the Polish aviators who participated in the French campaign, but in the total number of Polish aviators who produced accounts expressing dissatisfaction with the French. The wording was selected so as to avoid counting multiple accounts by the same aviator. However, your suggestion shall work just as fine.
2. You suggest that relevance be established by looking at the dissatisfaction accounts divided by the total number of accounts. This could work, but I suggested the other way, as Franek is looking for ways to generalize. My proposed way looks at all Polish aviators involved. Your proposed way looks at those of the Poles who produced accounts. That would mean a limitation of the group called "The" Poles, hence a limitation of the scope of the generalization. Consider the situation that the group size would be 200, and that there were 10 notorious rebels, who were always venting dissatisfaction. If a generalization would be made on that basis, then this would not do justice to the 190 others, and therefore not to the group.
3. Perhaps therefore you suggest to raise the significance level from 10 to 20%. That's fine with me. It has always surprised me that in medicine doctors produced theses on the basis of less than 10 cases of a certain type of disease, whilst the group described runs into the millions. A level between 5 and 10% is usually accepted as sufficient to declare significance, but surely a higher percentage shall deliver a clearer case. We are free to make these choices, as long as we explain what we are doing, if we wish to make sense.
An improvement of the proposed strategy would be to shift the significance declaration to the chapter "opinions". In fact this is a nice example of Franek's statement, that much of what we call fact is in fact opinion. Again, the fact here is the agreement about the content of the statement, not the content itself.
Regards,
Rob
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