I lack the expertise to inventory all the tools in a forensic critic's toolbox, but they include studies of handwriting and watermarks, microscopic examination of fibers, and the chemical and ultraviolet analysis of ink and paper. You needn't know the details of spectrographic analysis to understand the principles behind them. As it happens, the arguments that did exist are interesting because they're part of a major epistemological and historiographical sea-change. The disputants never forgot that Macpherson wasn't the most sympathetic character. 5 Name-calling is tiresome, but some charges were more substantive.
Consistency can take two forms, internal and external, but both pose serious problems.
That evidence is spot-on, but some shafts missed the target. When Davies drifts from verbal to other sorts of internal evidence, his accusations become, at least for us, less convincing. It follows that the work cannot be ascribed to Ossian. And although they often make for stirring rhetoric, they're liable to embarrassing blunders. Though not a case of fakery per se , the dispute over the Epistles of Phalaris provides a telling example of seemingly internal evidence used improperly.