The strange persistence of (source) “identification” claims in forensic literature through descriptivism, diagnosticism and machinism

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Many forensic scientists consider that identification (individualisation) – in the sense of statements of the kind “the questioned item and the known item come from the same source” – is a concept that is central to their discipline. This is so despite decade-long, fundamental critiques levelled by both practitioners and academics against the conceptual and practical feasibility of forensic identification. Oddly, there is a constant stream of publications in (peer-reviewed) forensic science journals that treat forensic identification axiomatically as a valid object of study, sidestepping the fundamental critiques. This paper reviews and discusses three exemplary strands of publications that exemplify this persistent trend. These strands are called descriptivism, diagnosticism and machinism. The latter term refers to methods borrowed from the now increasingly popular approaches used in the field of machine learning. In turn, descriptivism and diagnosticism refer to general design aspects of mainstream research methods, illustrated here through a critical review of two recent papers on, respectively, forensic odontology and a framework for interpreting fingerprint evidence. The critique of the use of ‘identification’ in these strands of publication includes, but goes beyond, semantic details and the reiteration of long-known shortcomings of obsolete technical language such as ‘match’ and ‘matching’. Specifically, this paper exposes deeper problems such as the subtle and argumentatively unfounded carrying-over of source conclusions to ultimate issues and the use probability concepts for questions that require more than the mere quantification of uncertainty. This paper submits that in order to foster trust in an era of continually expanding publishing activities, it should be a vital interest to forensic science journals to better examine what identification-related research can and cannot legitimately purport to achieve.