Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence Revisited

Ronald J Allen

doi:10.33115/udg_bib/qf.i2.22446

Abstract

We revisit Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence, published twenty years ago. The evolution of the relative plausibility theory of juridical proof is offered as evidence of the advantage of a naturalized approach to the study of the field and law evidence. Various alternative explanations of aspects of juridical proof from other disciplines are examined and their shortcomings described. These competing explanations are similar in their reductive, a priori approaches that are at odds with an empirically oriented naturalized approach. The shortcomings of the various a priori approaches are driven by their common methodological commitments to employing weird hypotheticals to engage in intuition mining about the American legal systems that in turn ignore important aspects of the actual legal systems and consistently make impossible epistemological demands. As a result, both their descriptions of and prescriptions for American legal systems are implausible, unlike the relative plausibility theory.

Highlights

The evolution of the relative plausibility theory of juridical proof is offered as evidence of the advantage of a naturalized approach to the study of the field and law of evidence
We employed that methodological approach to demonstrate that an emerging theory of juridical proof—the relative plausibility theory—was systematically superior to the reigning probabilistic conception 1
There is good reason to believe that relative plausibility has supplanted probabilism as the dominant paradigm for understanding juridical proof 3. This has been aided by the shoring up of the foundations of relative plausibility that began in the original Allen/ Leiter article through incorporation of aspects of inference to the best explanation informed by the reality of the American trial process and the manner in which people reason in real life 4

Summary

Introduction

By comparison to the formalistic probability approaches, what one sees when one looks at the American legal systems, and the scope of the project of understanding juridical proof, was recently succinctly explained: Its scope is [...] about the entire process of proof, including [1] the form, securing, and presentation of evidence, [2] the forms of argumentation employed at trial, [3] the manner in which humans process and deliberate on evidence, [4] the trial structure created by the rules of evidence and procedure, [5] the structure of litigation before and after trial, [6] the manner in which judges and juries, on the one hand, and trial and appellate judges, on the other hand, interact, and [7] to some extent about the meaning and nature of rationality.

Results

Conclusion