Time Travel Talk Show

Origin. Framing device; combines prospective hindsight with adversarial interview.

Mechanism. Places the design in front of an interlocutor from another era who has no shared assumptions with the present, and requires the design to be justified in terms available to that interlocutor.

Procedure. Convene figures from distinct periods or traditions. Have each interrogate the proposal from its own commitments. Keep the questions that cannot be answered by pointing at contemporary consensus.

Applies to. Stress-testing whether a justification is a reason or a convention.

Limitations. The historical figures are simulated by the practitioner and will therefore ask questions the practitioner already knows how to ask. The technique's ceiling is the practitioner's own imagination of the other.