Talk:in the presence of

RFD discussion: March–August 2023

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in the presence of

This was deleted out of process. PUC – 21:46, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Weak keep as creator. I agree it's SOP, but I am inclined to keep it for the translations. PUC – 21:46, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Keep, per lemmings. DCDuring (talk) 18:25, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

• RFD kept Pious Eterino (talk) 08:10, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

in the absence of

Same as above. PUC – 21:52, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Weak keep as creator. I agree it's SOP, but I am inclined to keep it for the translations. PUC – 21:46, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Delete: Personally I'm not a fan of the t-hub argument for inclusion... These phrases look SOP to me. – Guitarmankev1 ^(talk) 18:53, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

The translations don't impress me as THUB-worthy but are they really SOP? It's not obvious to me what in is doing here exactly, and it's also hard to think of any synonyms that would work for "presence" and "absence", which suggests they're fixed phrases. For example, "in the lack of" does not work in the same syntactic contexts as "in the absence" ("in the absence of a spade, we used a spoon", *"in the lack of a spade, we used a spoon"), and "in the existence of" does not work for "in the presence of" ("we were in the presence of a genius", *"we were in the existence of a genius"). Perhaps that's because of semantic nuances, but it's hard to pin them down if so. Abstain for now. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 22:45, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out, it was bugging me. Actually I think in the absence of isn't so much an antonym of in the presence of as a synonym of for want of / for lack of. In French, I think en présence de ~ en l’absence de can be considered antonyms, but I'm wondering whether en l’absence de doesn't actually have two senses, one of them being for lack of (synonymous with faute de: en l'absence de réponse). PUC – 22:58, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes I think they might need to be treated separately, and I agree they're not antonyms: the opposite of "In the absence of a spade..." is not "In the presence of a spade...", and likewise saying you are "in the absence of" something only really works as a joke. One option for an SOP decomposition might be to interpret someone or something's "presence" as a kind of conceptual space, which would make it similar to earshot (hence "in earshot of", "within earshot" etc). In that case we would expect "within the presence of" to work, and at least with a pronoun ("within his presence") it does—though the specific form "within the presence of" seems to be a non-native-speaker thing. This idea doesn't seem to work at all for "absence", though: "within the absence of" is just wrong. In general there seems to be a stronger argument for treating "in the absence of" as non-SOP. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 00:45, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

• RFD kept Pious Eterino (talk) 08:10, 10 August 2023 (UTC)