The presentation by Assoc. Prof. Bašić Hanžek, PhD, entitled “What Is That Gleaming in the Green Forest? Inference to the Best Explanation and Where to Find It,” aimed to point out that the invocative Slavic antithesis in the Ballad of Hasanaginica contains a stylistically modified procedure of inference to the best explanation, and that within the corpus of national oral literature examined so far, such a Slavic antithesis appears in only one other poem (Ljuba and Her Sister Rescue Sekula from Captivity). Particular emphasis was placed on the presence of counterfactual reasoning (counterfactual conditionals), as well as deductive reasoning, within the antithetical figure of the Ballad of Hasanaginica. The presence of stylistic play with inference to the best explanation is interpreted here as a manifestation of the natural intellectual sharpness of the Morlachs, about which Alberto Fortis writes in several places in his Travels into Dalmatia. Furthermore, since Fortis cites the Morlachs’ inclination toward debate (the episode involving the exchange of Turkish and Venetian prisoners) as an example of such sharpness, the trace of abduction and deduction preserved in this oral poem is treated as an argument in support of the non-adaptationist theory of the historical emergence of deduction advocated by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Dialogical Roots of Deduction), at least with regard to the Croatian Mediterranean cultural sphere. Further research (a survey of materials) within the framework of the MEDHRID project should determine whether additional traces of this kind can be found in local oral heritage.
