Author Description

Northwestern University Press co-published William Twining's Rethinking Evidence in 1994 and Analysis of Evidence in 1998. This new volume, Evidence and Inference, is an interdisciplinary volume exploring the application of techniques of evidence and inference across a variety of fields. Coedited by Twining, one of the world's outstanding evidence scholars, and Iain Hampsher-Monk, a leading political theorist, the volume considers intriguing questions from Assyriology, theater iconography, musicology, criminology, the history of ideas, and colonial history as it reveals how particular concepts, lines of questioning, and techniques of reasoning and analysis developed in one context can be fruitfully applied in others. Did cuneiform languages really die out in the second or third century B.C.? Was Schubert responsible for any of the guitar arrangements for some of his lieder? In these cases and others, the authors' work demonstrates that, regardless of the field or the problem, all such projects involve drawing inferences from evidence, and that the logic of this kind of inquiry is always governed by the same principles.