Hi WM,

Quote Originally Posted by wm View Post
A little grist for the mill about the applicability of SLA Marshall's work today.

Usually, when one extrapolates from the known past to the present or future, this is called arguing from analogy. That is, one draws inferences about how things will be in the future based on relelvant similarities to things in the past. However, a major piece of the portrayal must also show that the present case and the past case do not have too many relelvant dissimilarities.
This is something that Anthropologists do all the time - reason by analogy. Personally, I think that Carlo Ginzburg's position on this is probably best: (paraphrasing) The interpretation that requires the fewest number of additional hypotheses is the most plausible (aka Ginzburg's Razor; note that this considers plausibility, not "truth"). I like the concept of "relevant dissimilarities" but, I have to ask, who decides relevance?

Marc