Jack Lynch, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century BritainDeception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Jack Lynch. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xiii+218.

Abstract

Having launched his powerful Ossianic illustration of the intricacies of fraud, Jack Lynch proceeds to dissect, chapter by chapter, the variant eighteenth-century methods of dealing with fakery, such as resorting to ridicule, authorial credentials, the boasted greatness of a work, commonsense norms, and appeals to universal human experience discussed in chapter 2. Chapter 3 unfolds an acute analysis of a crucial evolution in legal evidence, from positive demonstrations of certainty to circumstantial presumptions of epistemic probability reflected increasingly in seventeenth-century English jurisprudence and systematized in Sir Geoffrey Gilbert’s The Law of Evidence (1754). Epistemic probability was central to empirical inductive intellection at the heart of the pervasive eighteenth-century concern with deception. Chapters 4 and 5 detail internal and external consistency as standards for detecting deception, which, if clear enough to formulate, proved difficult to implement with uniform cogency. This is so for external consistency, “because every attempt to compare a questionable account against the known world raises many epistemological problems” (99). The important point is made about the age’s unprecedented ontological openness to new observation as opposed to traditional authoritative testimony discredited by scientific investigation and the acceptance of epistemic probability. And yet a major problem arose in exposing imposture on this new basis: “At what point should a doubtful new claim be enough to overturn conventional wisdom?” (107). There never would be any set rules for answering this question.