Wright still doesn’t get it. In his latest update to his response to Dennett he writes:
Some of Dennett’s defenders have e-mailed to accuse me of playing “Gotcha”. They say I take two separate parts of Dennett’s interview [A and B in the transcript excerpts above], note that they logically imply the existence of evidence of higher purpose, and then attribute that conclusion to Dennett even though he never states the conclusion explicitly.
But it’s more than that. At the very beginning of the interview, Dennett explicitly disavows the position which Wright seeks to deduce from his later answers. One might reasonably expect Wright to pause and reflect on whether Dennett was in fact conceding the position, or whether he (Wright) was making a mistake in drawing the conclusion. And as Wright wrote:
Dennett didn’t volunteer this opinion enthusiastically, or for that matter volunteer it at all. He conceded it in the course of a dialogue with me—and extracting the concession was a little like pulling teeth.
In his latest response, Wright concedes:
Granted, I should have used less dramatic language in attributing this conclusion to him. Rather than saying in paragraph 3 of the Beliefnet piece that he had “declared” the existence of evidence of higher purpose, I should have said he “acknowledged” it.
Rubbish. Try: “…I should have said that I put those words into his mouth, without checking that this what what he meant.”
Wright insists that Dennett’s complaint “…continues to strike me as wholly untenable. But I suppose I could be wrong.” As I noted, his approach seems fundamentally dishonest. He seems more interested in preserving what he seems to view as his “scalp” than in reaching a meeting of the minds, and this is not to his credit. Based on all that has passed, does Wright still seriously believe that Dennett “acknowledges a higher purpose”? (If he does, is this belief falsifiable?)
The obvious solution would be for Wright to simply state:
“When I wrote the Beliefnet piece, I believed that Dennett’s statements during our interview constituted an acceptance of a ‘higher purpose’ viewpoint. However it is clear from what Dennett has said, in that interview and subsequently, that he does not hold this viewpoint. I therefore recognize that my inference must have arisen from a mutual misunderstanding.”
Would that be so hard? Even the RavingAtheist would probably accept it.