Factual inference as analogical reasoning: a comment on Professor Tillers' 'The structure and logic of proof in trials'

Abstract

Being a young scholar in the evidence law, it is for me both thrilling and frightening to comment on Professor Tillers’s piece. ‘Thrilling’ because the piece deals with many inspiring themes ranging from human ‘submerged’ reasoning to social truth finding practices, from ingrained epistemological mechanisms to the ‘mystery’ of our evolution. ‘Frightening’ because such may not be the themes which a young scholar should venture to write about. Great is the risk for him to say something either trite or not founded upon sufficient experience and reflection. This said, I will try to channel my inspiration as well as to overcome my fears, proposing some concise and tentative thoughts that are likely to be elaborated on in my future research and writings. I dare advance analogical reasoning as a candidate for Professor Tillers’s descriptive ‘desiderata’. Analogy is here intended in its classical meaning, i.e. ‘resemblance of relations’ between two or more instances. The expression ‘A is to B as C is to D’ can tell us quite a bit about how we understand ourselves and the world surrounding us, especially if we think of A, B and C as familiar and of D as unknown. More precisely, if we conceive of analogical reasoning as the establishment of a resemblance obtained by transferring the ‘relational predicate’1 ‘A is to B’ to instance C (given that the last shares some relevant properties with A),2 we immediately perceive its correspondence with inferential reasoning. Indeed, as Hume and Mill already showed,3 we realize that analogy is closely related to (if not the hearth of) induction: deriving the unknown from the known appears to be nothing but establishing an analogy. As obvious as the above might seem, I think it bears some interesting ramifications. Professor Tillers pointed out two important features of his desired ‘ontology’: it must account for what he refers to as the ‘mystery’ of our evolution as well as for the truth finding capacity of some of our social practices. Analogical reasoning may accommodate both. On the one hand, it is the engine of