Scientific Method and Expert Witnessing: Victorian Perspectives on a Modern Problem

Abstract

The disagreement of scientists serving as expert witnesses in courts of law or forums for public policymaking is well known, and has raised philosophical questions about the applicability of general knowledge to particular instances, philosophical and sociological questions about the place of dissent in science, sociological questions about the investment of credibility, and, most importantly, pragmatic questions about how societies are to utilize expertise in making just and wise decisions. These are not new problems. Expert disagreement was common in the nineteenth century, and Victorian scientists such as Robert Angus Smith, William Odling, William Crookes and Norman Lockyer recognized and discussed these problems with a clarity and an acuity that is absent from much of the modern literature. This paper focuses on debates about expert witnessing which occurred in 1860 and 1885, and uses these debates to suggest that the role of expertise in jurisprudence and policymaking needs to be rethought so as to recognize expert disagreement as a normal, rather than a pathological, phenomenon.