Stewart pointed to Smith’s account of the development of human languages as an instance, but the epithet might equally be applied to Smith’s account of the evolution of moral principles out of our innate human faculty of “sympathy” with our fellows.
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Greg Priest
Adam Smith was baptized OTD in 1723.
A frequent explanatory practice was what Dugald Stewart called “conjectural history”—a narrative, fictive in its particulars, that is somehow truer in capturing the general processes by which certain phenomena tend to unfold.
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