I don't see the value to my summarizing your position. Since you're not going to take the advice any time soon (something I didn't know when it was offered, although I know it now, but who's to say what the future holds?), then perhaps it's best seen as a statement of my position on some issues that you'd raised, and we move on.Paul, if you are sure you grasp what I have attempted to argue sufficiently to offer your advice then I want you to sum up my view in your own words to demonstrate that you have,
That does happen on the internet, but the current issues between us couldn't be more straightforward, upon which I hold as follows:because everything you say in response to it otherwise indicates to me that we are talking past each other.
* There is little or no role for cannot, must, ... in nondemonstrative reasoning; if there were, then it wouldn't be nondemonstrative.
* As is typical of scholarly groups, there are currently well regarded, domain-specific heurisitics peculiar to those who study and teach about the human past.
* Within a subject as vast as the human past, there will predictably be problems where those heuristics perform well, and other problems where the same heuristics fail to produce information or even to apply. If the latter were not true, then the "rules" would not be heuristics.
* In heuristics, the person doing the investigation ordinarily and usually determines which heuristics to use in which problems. People will differ about this. It doesn't follow that one of the disputants is not a historian, even if the critic is a historian, which is not always the case. Nobody owns the words history and historian.
* Since shortly after the turn of the Nineteenth Century (and so before there was a contemporary sense of history as an academic pursuit), there have been well-developed, rigorous domain-independent norms for managing uncertain reasoning, including reasoning about evidence - and reasoning when it's scarce or even lacking (which is, blessedly, hardly ever). These norms are themselves heuristic, and are subject to development and adaptation to each specific domain's characteristic needs.
* The adaptation most easily occurs if there is conversation among the parties in interest.
* Few things could shut down conversation more reliably than someone telling a student or teacher of the human past that they aren't entitled to describe themselves as historians, because the heuristics that they judge suited to their chosen problems aren't the same as those used by other people who also self-identify as historians, who study and teach about different problems and different aspects of the human past.
Anything in the above that is unclear, I'd be delighted to explain.