So whether the proponent of a critical theory is conservative, liberal, or somewhere in between has nothing to do with whether his theory is true or false. Critical theories must be evaluated on the basis of their merits or lack of the same and not on the basis of who proposes them. Professor Don Foster proved that writers leave in their works signs of their identity that are just as telling as fingerprints or DNA that may be left behind at a crime scene. If the identify of the person who left the fingerprints or DNA is not known, forensic experts could still determine that the same person was involved in crimes A and B if the same prints or DNA should be found at both scenes. If the fingerprints and DNA found at both scenes are different, this would give investigators reasonable cause to conclude that the crimes were committed by different persons.
Literary analysis works the same way.
If the identity of a writer is not known, experts can still determine that documents A and B were written by the same person if the same stylistic patterns and other literary imprints are found in both documents. Likewise, if the style, vocabulary, and other literary imprints are very different in both documents, scholars can be reasonably sure that the documents were written by different persons. These are the methods that biblical critics use to determine such matters as the probability that the same person who wrote the epistles to the Corinthians and Romans did not write the pastoral epistles, even though all of these documents claim that they were written by the apostle Paul, or the likelihood that noticeable internal differences in style, vocabulary, and theme within such books as Isaiah and Jeremiah point to multiple authorships rather than the tradition that both books were each written by just one person. Although textual critics undoubtedly reach some wrong conclusions, there is certainly no reason to doubt the general reliability of the critical methods that they use to make these determinations. If it is true, as Professor Don Foster proved, that those who write in English put identifying linguistic markers in their works, there is no reason to believe that this is not true of those who write in other languages.