I find “source please” only somewhat dismissive, but I would find it similarly so if the claim was a more direct, less empirical one.
I read “source please” as a statement that your interpretive claim is too strong to be supported by the quantity of interpretation you have provided. There is no reason your source could not be an essay instead of a pile of data and statistics. Hopefully such an essay would make use of at least some quantity of data.
Non-obvious interpretations need justification for all the same reasons that non-obvious direct empirical claims do, and I don’t think it’s more or less dismissive in one case than the other to call for a source. Specifically, what I find dismissive is not the request for a source, but the failure to engage the claim otherwise. That said, I’m not sure I find it inappropriate here.
I find “source please” only somewhat dismissive, but I would find it similarly so if the claim was a more direct, less empirical one.
I read “source please” as a statement that your interpretive claim is too strong to be supported by the quantity of interpretation you have provided. There is no reason your source could not be an essay instead of a pile of data and statistics. Hopefully such an essay would make use of at least some quantity of data.
Non-obvious interpretations need justification for all the same reasons that non-obvious direct empirical claims do, and I don’t think it’s more or less dismissive in one case than the other to call for a source. Specifically, what I find dismissive is not the request for a source, but the failure to engage the claim otherwise. That said, I’m not sure I find it inappropriate here.