“Was there Firing in Sandy Row that Night?”: Some Features of the Organisation of Disputes about Recorded Facts

Abstract

Members of organisations and public alike routinely treat the mention of some event in a record as unambiguous evidence for “the fact of” that event's occurrence, and thereby as an untroublesome basis for making inferences, deciding future courses of action, etc. However, there are occasions on which the factual character of a record is challenged and the subject of dispute. In this paper we examine such a dispute, which occurs between a cross‐examining counsel and a police witness during a Tribunal of Inquiry into events in Northern Ireland. In the analysis we explicate some of the moral inferential work (the allocation of blame, the construction of justifications, etc.) that can be bound up with such disputes, and we attempt to locate the procedures available to the interactants both for “authorising” the “fact” that some event occurred, and for challenging or defeating claims about such facts (in particular with procedures that have to do with the conventional basis for knowledge about certain events in the world).