S.L.A. Marshall fact or fraud?

[marct]

Hi WM,

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

[wm]

I like the concept of "relevant dissimilarities" but, I have to ask, who decides relevance?

Marc,
I post this at the risk of being chastised again for being outside the scope of this thread's original point.

I suspect that relevance is decided by "them" . I further suspect that you know how "them" is. "Them" is that otherwise faceless, nameless group of authorities to whom we appeal whenever we don't really want to put our own necks, reputations, etc. on the line. Our parents invoked "them" all the time, and we probably do as well when we try to impart the hard lessons to our children. For example:
Child: "Why can't I drink that entire 2 liter bottle of Coke in one sitting?"
Parent: "You know, they say that Coke cleans rust off a car's chrome. Do you want that stuff swirling around in your stomach?"
"Them" is City Hall, as in "You can't fight City Hall."
"Them" includes the folks who create all those urban legends that we find discounted on the internet at Snopes or discredited on TV by the Myth Busters.
"Them" are all the otherwise unnamed popular sages who maintain the status quo of our collective "wisdom" (AKA lore, myhtology, popular science, etc.)

More seriously, your point about determining relevance applies to the similarities as well as the dissimilarities. I think that most arguments from analogy suffer from a form of circular reasoning--that is the arguers have already presupposed the conclusion to some degree and are therefore looking for similar cases to lend support to their positions. Arguing by analogy adds little new knowledge to our stock pile of truth. Instead, the technique entrenches what has passed for truth in the past.

Sorry for the rehashing of Humean skepticism. (I throw this last in as an attempt to bring my post back into the realm of History. David did write a compendious history of England, didn't he?)

[marct]

More seriously, your point about determining relevance applies to the similarities as well as the dissimilarities. I think that most arguments from analogy suffer from a form of circular reasoning--that is the arguers have already presupposed the conclusion to some degree and are therefore looking for similar cases to lend support to their positions. Arguing by analogy adds little new knowledge to our stock pile of truth. Instead, the technique entrenches what has passed for truth in the past.

I suspect that you are correct in this <sigh>. It's one of the reasons why I like Ginzburg's work so much, especially his methodological work. He has a great article in History Workshop (Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method, History Workshop 9 (1980):5-36), and his methodology is nicely summarized in Muir and Ruggiero's Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe:

Ginzburg wants to employ the primal method of the Paleolithic hunter, that first philologist, who recognized from paw prints that a lion he had never actually seen, heard, touched, or smelled had come this way. The characteristic feature of the hunter's knowledge "was that it permitted the leap from aparently insignificant facts, which could be observed, to a complex reality which - directly at least - could not. And these facts would be ordered by the observer in such a way as to provide a narrative sequence - at its simplest, 'something passed this way.'"

Then again, Ginzburg is not after "truth", which he believes that w cannot know, but, rather, plausibility.

Marc

[dusty]

I disregarded Marshall's work after reading COL Hackworth's account in 'About Face'. I had read very little of his work before then, but even then it seemed like dramatized history.

[PhilR]

I believe that there was an article in the Journal of Military History in the last few years that actually validated Marshall's conclusions.
While not a validation, I remember LtGen P.K. Van Riper USMC (ret) discussing the personal impact of reading Marshall's Men Against Fire. The book became Van Riper's touchstone. He read it before and after every tour in a combat zone, making notes and developing his own thoughts along the way.

[Sigaba]

Marshall's grandson, John Douglas Marshall, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Later, the younger Marshall embarked on a journey to confront the many questions about the authenticity and reliability of his grandfather's works. This journey is the basis for J.D. Marshall's memoir, Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey (ISBN-13: 978-0295979496).

In that work, the younger Marshall establishes that SLAM offered as facts events from his own life that were demonstrably false. SLAM also comes across as haphazard with his use of facts in his research and writing on military affairs. (The younger Marshall's anguish over these discoveries is evident.)

In my own research on the elder Marshall, I concluded that the man's slapdash approach to history renders his works problematic as reliable contributions to American military historiography.

In my opinion, S.L.A. Marshall, like Stephen Ambrose, J.F.C. Fuller, B. H. Liddell Hart, and, to a much smaller degree, John Jessup, are cautionary tales of what happens when students of warfare seek renown and celebrity.

[William F. Owen]

In my opinion, S.L.A. Marshall, like Stephen Ambrose, J.F.C. Fuller, B. H. Liddell Hart, and, to a much smaller degree, John Jessup, are cautionary tales of what happens when students of warfare seek renown and celebrity.

Wow! I can only agree. Liddell-Hart was especially prone to plagiarism, fraud, and the altering of facts to fit his thesis. Regardless of this he still has a strong following amongst US military thinkers.

Fuller at least had some genuinely original ideas and useful insights, but they were not as many as commonly supposed.