New Comparative Interpretation: A Primer

Comparative studies usually begin by relating two or more authors' responses to some shared question and then go on to point out similarities and differences. Sometimes they end with an interpreter arguing in favor of one response over another. Less frequently a comparative analysis ends by relating the different positions to some broader frame of reference. To go on to locate the competing views within a dynamic pattern of related but distinct stages in understanding a shared question is a relatively new enterprise. What contemporary developmental psychologists have been pursuing in their field offers some hope that scholars in other fields can do the same in their inquiries. The main purpose of the book, the first in a series, is to bring this relatively new form of comparative interpretation to the attention of other scholars and to encourage their future experiments with it. The question for readers is whether this is a promising way of doing comparative interpretation, one remote from current practice but possibly evading some of its intellectual impasses and so introducing a better future practice.