Metaphysics and Epistemology Group (Tuesday - Week 4, TT25)

Abstract: A major problem in legal epistemology is the proof paradox: both laypeople and professionals view judgments of guilt or culpability that rest on bare statistical evidence as unwarranted even when this evidence seems to provide the same or more support for the guilt or culpability of the defendant compared with what is required in other cases. For example, the fact that a bus company owns 70% of the buses in a certain town is insufficient to find the company liable for harm in a bus accident without witnesses. When the bare statistical evidence is absent but there is a 70% reliable witness who claims to have seen a bus from said company in the accident, by contrast, both courts and laypeople are inclined to judge the company liable. 

We bring the perspective of philosophers of science to bear on this problem, arguing for two main conclusions. First, the concept of bare statistical evidence is crucially ambiguous between statistical in the sense of descriptive population statistics and statistical in the sense of inferential statistics. We affirm that descriptive population statistics cannot provide a reliable universal foundation for (legal) decision-making, but deny that the same holds of inferential statistics. Second, considerations of values analogous to those in science can, do, and should play a crucial role in the courts’ response to bare statistical evidence. Like (classical) statisticians, courts must balance the risks of different types of error, and we suggest that both the general practice and apparent exceptions can be explained by value judgments about the costs of different errors. 

Thus science may be a more productive analogue of legal decision-making then an individual epistemic agent is. After all, both science and the law turn on what can be intersubjectively proven in a way that individual epistemology is not normally thought to.