Isn't the onus on the ones claiming that Spartans practiced systemic infanticide to provide the evidence that they did so?
These accounts aren’t perfect. Not necessarily first hand eye witnesses, but not rumor mongers either.
So anyone arguing that this didn’t happen needs to address an established consensus.
Lots of more recent research is attacking traditional ideas about the Spartans, so this is a welcome argument.
But saying “it’s on them to prove their point” isn’t really helpful.
A specialist in the area could just say “appeal to authority” and they’d be right. The actual peer reviewed articles and books would require evidence.
But those articles and books wouldn’t be accessible to the average reader.
So the journalist is summarizing those arguments, but in the process reducing them to an appeal to authority - which is completely fine.
Each reader can decide for himself how much evidence he needs to be persuaded.
[1] Source: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
I would suggest reading the posted blog-post. The author <em>do</em> know what he is talking about and–in my opinion—quiet an engaging writer.
"Σπαρτιάτης" is used in Greek (modern and ancient) to mean a (male) inhabitant of a place called "Sparta". What the blog author claims is that there are _two_ words, one of which means free citizens of Sparta and the other, helots. He says that one of those words is "Spartiate" and that the other is "Spartan".
This is a distinction that is impossible to make with a single word in Greek. The words he uses, "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are two Latin transliterations of the single Greek word "Σπαρτιάτης", that has one single meaning, as I explain it above.
Furthermore, the distinction between free and enslaved inhabitans of Sparta is, in all historical sources, made clear by using two words with different roots: "Spartan" for the free citizens of the city, "helot" for the enslaved people of the surrounding territories of the city-state. Nobody else than the author calls one "Spartan" and the other "Spartiate". That's entirely the blog author's made-up terminology.
So what I'm saying the blog author has made up is the distinct meaning of "Spartan" and "Spartiate". I do not claim that he has made up the word "Spartiate", as you seem to assume in your comment. Please correct me if I misunderstood your comment, and not you mine.
And a small edit: It was your last parenthesis that confused me, I would have written it as:
“or even "Spartiate", a term distinguished by the author of the blog as distinct from "Spartan"…”
"Homoioi" (όμοιοι) means "equals" or "peers". That's what Spartans considered each other and they'd use that word in context, but used the demonym "Spartan" to refer to their fellow free citizens of Sparta as did everybody else. The helots were called either helots or ..."the Spartans' slaves".
And as for the title point: Spartans seem to only be mentioned in the article coverage of the research. They are not the topic of the research itself. Sparta doesn't even appear in the abstract of the paper. Demonstrating that infanticide of disabled babies wasn't a widespread practice in Ancient Greece does not necessarily mean that it wasn't practiced by a group that only consisted of the elite class of one state.
A weak counterclaim does not imply the claim to be truth.
Yes. So? The options are not just that we accept whatever fact is presented, or accept whatever is the oposite of it. We can just say: “looks like we don’t know” and that is perfectly fine.
A claim or a counterclaim (is there even a distinction?) warrants the same amount of proof.
Yes that is exactly what I was saying.
You wrote:
> Is there a name for being arbitrarily biased against a counterclaim?
Who is arbitrarily biassed against a counterclaim in your opinion here? Debby Sneed who wrote the study? Andrew Curry who wrote the science.org article about the study? gadflyinyoureye who wrote the comment your comment is responding to? Someone else?
> The simple fact that this is posed as a counterclaim itself seems to invoke skepticism...
As it should. I don't see the bias here. Are you saying that someone accepts claims without skepticism but not counterclaims? Who?
Strong men never make mistakes. Never. Only weak men do. You know it's true. You've seen it. Cavemen have seen it. Probably true in some animal societies, too