I apologize for in advance for any questions I havent answered or insults I have missed. I thought I would stick with the current flow for al least a moment, and return to the rest later.
JES and Patrick,
I agree with your Sebonack example. My understanding is that designing a course is often a collaborative process, even if it is between an owner and a designer, or a designer and his associates, or as appears to be the case with Sebonack, an owner and two design teams. We are rarely if ever going to know the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of it, unless we were there, or someone reliable tells us, or unless there is extraordinary written record.
Mostly what we have to go on is what the parties involved tell us, and that can often be well short of the entire story. With contemporary courses, we can dig and maybe find out that an associate did more, or that X really deserves responsibility for much of what is good or bad, but with long past courses we sometimes have little or no chance to build it back into something.
Patrick this is why I suggested to you a hypothetical circumstance where Mr. Pascucci (or a Mr. Keiser) singles someone out for a particular credit on a course, but there is no way to confirm or deny it, and really no reason to distrust him. Even if for whatever reasons (say I Sebonack example I am a certifiable Doak “Butt Boy” and I don’t want any credit to go to Nicklaus or his people,) I might wish that Pascucci handn’t said it, or that he was just paying lip service, I would have no basis for not taking him at his word.
In our current example we have Lesley singling the committee and MacDonald (and Whigham) out when summarizing how the course was laid out. Yet many on this board want to discredit, diminish, discount, and/or entirely ignore Lesley’s statement by second-guessing him. They resist taking Lesley’s words at face-value unless and until information surfaces describing MacDonald’s specific involvement. That information might not be readily available for a modern project, much less one which took place 95 years ago.
But the real kicker is that these guys know and admit that the relevant body of information no longer exists. They say they are demanding specifics to get at the truth, but they know damn well that determining the specifics about the original laying out of Merion East is currently impossible, and the details of the original laying out of the course may be lost forever, if they ever existed.
So Patrick, when I say that . . .
[size=4x]
It's unreasonable to conclude that CBM wasn't involved based on the absence of information citing his involvement.[/size] . . .
. . . I meant it, or at least meant it in the context of when I said it. If you want to drop the context then I’d modify it slightly, as you will see below.
The problem with their argument is that it is entirely based on an invalid inference. They infer a specific conclusion based on a premise which is generally true, but not specifically true. There is a name for this type of logical fallacy, but I can’t remember it and don’t feel like looking it up.
Their syllogism concluding that MacDonald was not specifically involved in the original laying out of Merion East goes something like this:
1. Premise 1: Available historical records generally indicate the specific involvement of all those who are significantly involved in laying out a golf course.
2. Premise 2: The historical record does not evidence any involvement by CBM in laying out the early Merion East.
3. Conclusion: Therefore CBM was not significantly involved in laying out of the early Merion East.
The problem is, while the First Premise is generally true, it is not always true, so the proof fails.
Moreover, there proof cannot be fixed by making the first premise more specific. As THEY KNOW, their First Premise is FALSE in this particular situation.
So, whatever the truth of the generalization . . .[size=4x]
It's unreasonable to conclude that CBM wasn't specifically involved based on the absence of information citing his specific involvement.[/size][/color]
They know that the early records just do not specifically identify who did what during the laying out the early Merion East. So we are left with the following:
1. The historical record does not identify CBM's specific involvement in the laying out of Merion East.
2. BUT THE AVAILABLE HISTORICAL RECORD IS INCOMPLETE IN THAT IT DOES NOT EVIDENCE THE SPECIFIC INVOLVEMENT OF ANYONE ELSE, EITHER.
3. Therefore, ONE CANNOT DETERMINE CBM'S LEVEL OF SPECIFIC INVOLVEMENT IN THE INITIAL DESIGN BY LOOKING AT THE HISTORICAL RECORD We just do not know and probably never will.
This is why I have been saying that the demand for specific evidence was a wild goose chase from the beginning. They knew there was nothing out there one way or another, and they ought to have known that that there approach employs faulty logic and proves nothing what so ever.
In the end we are left with the published statements of men like Lesley, and no logical or factually supportable reasons to discount them. At least based on the record I have seen.