Some Epistemological Considerations About Reasonable Proofs

Abstract

Theories developed within the contemporary analytic epistemology, together with researches about reasonable doubt, are in my opinion suitable analysis instruments encouraging to interpret the trial in its different characterizations, without sacrificing however its possible merely technical aspects. One of the commonplaces pertaining to the Italian trial culture is the idea that process analysis is useful only if it is really technical and not at all philosophical. This concept arises from the misunderstood and misleading acceptance of the militant propensity to protect from “dangerous contaminations” the patent peculiarities of each branch of law, and from the fact that trial is generally considered as exclusive prerogative of processualists, excluding therefore every kind of alternative speculation about it. In other Countries it is not so, especially in the North-American culture, where since many years, thanks to the American epistemologist Laudan, trial analysis includes interdisciplinary expressions, reflections, analysis and interpretations categories, which allows to not fossilize the investigation into predetermined limits and to extend trial interpretation also to a philosophic reading. Well, by clearing these “prejudices pertaining to processualists” it is possible to undertake trial analysis with an alternative epistemological behaviour, and to bring in new analysis perspectives allowing catching the deep substrate of the trial, regardless of usual classifications. In my opinion, to really change the analysis scheme, to avoid merely technical disquisitions producing only commonplaces, we must start examining facts, cases; we must forget the tailor-made purviews adapted for the case in question; we must stop bombarding the hapless reader with the napalm of quotations and we must stop using all ours wits in mentioning articles. Than, simply talking about cases: to verify, in the open space of the case reading, up to which extent it is possible to search analysis schemes and perspectives. More: without taking the trouble of verifying whether what we are saying when working on a judgment is “philosophical” or “trial related”. To try rather to let emerge the thinking which is, so to say, deposited in every judgment, absolutely independently from its particular typology. To stop, finally, joining concepts as “trial and philosophy”, comparing independent and not communicating sectors, and to plunge into the analysis of the “real and actual” judgments, eliminating protective, prescriptive filters and para-academic conformities. To consider once and for all solved - or in any case not so exclusive - the matter concerning trial statute, i.e. a question evoking a tedious propensity to remain involved in problems previously defined as merely theoretical. To go, indeed, as deep as possible to the core of the trial operation, using every available analytic instrument.