108 Andrew Wilson Head’s results yield 77 non-itacistic singulars, of which there were none of which improved the sense of the text. Hernández’s result was four readings from 322 non-orthographic singulars: 1.2%. Perhaps there are semantic improvements that the present author has missed in these studies, but there simply are not dozens, or hundreds, of them. Trawling through Royse’s 3000-odd footnotes will increase one’s respect for Royse’s magisterial and meticulous study, but it will not increase by very much the count of singulars that improve the text. The reason these studies comment upon so few singular readings that improve the sense appears not to be due to any reluctance to highlight cases where scribes removed difficulties or improved the text, but simply due to the fact that few of these improved readings really exist. It does not seem to be due to disbelief in the canon on the part of these research- ers for, on the contrary, the canon seems to be an implicit tenet of their belief-systems, for they do not even seem to think of testing it empirically or even questioning it, nor do they comment upon the remarkable lack of evidence for it in their studies. If historians finding two independent accounts of the same event think they have hit the historical jackpot, the alignment of results in the foregoing studies (as shown in the table below) would appear to indicate that we are standing on text-critical solid ground. It shows that scribes tended to improved the text about 1% of the time, after we exclude ortho- graphical variants. Colwell Royse Head Hernández Wilson Singulars 1014 1125 77 322 2279 Improvements 5 9 0 4 8 Percentage 0.5% 0.9% 0% 1.2% 0.4% Objections There are two sorts of objections that could be raised against these results, logical and methodological. Firstly, it could be argued that lectio difficilior potior must be true on logical grounds alone, irrespective of any evidence. The argument is a familiar one: assuming that scribes did not intentionally make the text more difficult, we should prefer a harder reading unless some obvious accidental explanation suggests itself. This argument, however, appears to commit a logical fallacy: the fallacy of the excluded middle (also known as the false-dilemma).