Many philosophers have pointed out that statistical evidence, or at least some forms of it, lack desirable epistemic or non-epistemic properties, and that this should make us wary of litigations in which the case against the defendant rests in whole or in part on statistical evidence. Others have responded that such broad reservations about statistical evidence are overly restrictive since appellate courts have expressed nuanced views about statistical evidence. In an effort to clarify and reconcile, I put forward an interpretive (...) analysis of why statistical evidence should raise concerns in some cases but not others. I argue that when there is a mismatch between the specificity of the evidence and the expected specificity of the accusation, statistical evidence—as any other kind of evidence—should be considered insufficient to sustain a conviction. I rely on different stylized court cases to illustrate the explanatory power of this analysis. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 85-103, October 2021.

Epistemic and practical interests are often in conflict. This also occurs in institutional settings such as the legal one. Rule 407 of the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence is an example of that because it sacrifices some epistemic interests in favour of practical ones. It is the rule on subsequent remedial measures (SRM), which is mainly designed to answer a practical concern (reducing accidents) instead of the epistemic one of getting some evidence to find out whether the defendant was negligent (...) or whether there was a defect in a product. Some commentators and courts think that the rationale of the rule is more complex and deserves a more careful discussion, as this paper shows. Additionally, this paper discusses a modification proposal (from categorical ban of SRM evidence to case‐by‐case decision) and develops some theoretical considerations, in the spirit of philosophical pragmatism, on the best way to conceptualize the problem addressed. The idea is to see such conflicts as conflicts of goals and to explain them in terms of the incompatible desires that we happen to have. (shrink)

In 2021, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (hereafter, BICS) sponsored an essay competition (hereafter, the Contest) designed to solicit the best evidence for the hypothesis that human consciousness survives bodily death, and more specifically, evidence that would prove this hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt. The summer 2022 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration featured a special subsection on the BICS contest and its winning essays. Robert Bigelow and Colm Kelleher outlined the motivation, design, and judging criteria for the (...) competition. Keith Augustine provided an extensive critical commentary on the contest design and eight of its prominent winning essays. Stephen Braude and several coauthors responded to Augustine’s criticisms, and Augustine provided a reply to Braude and his collaborators. Finally, the subsection concluded with a collaborative paper in which Etienne LeBel, Adam Rock, and Augustine proposed a more rigorous experimental design for testing the survival hypothesis. Augustine presented important criticisms of the Contest and several of its prominent winning essays. Moreover, many of his criticisms apply to survival literature in general and so are instructive for the wider survival debate. And Braude, one of the most important contributors to the survival debate since C.D. Broad and C.J. Ducasse, was at the helm of the reply to Augustine. Although the response to Augustine raised important concerns about skeptical assessments of the evidence for survival, it was hamstrung with several defects. 1. Preliminaries 2. Problematic Aspects of the Reply to Augustine 3. What is the Question? Honing in on the Actual Disagreement 4. Inference to Best Explanation 5. Confirmation Approaches to Evidential Support -- 5.1 Evidential Justification -- 5.2 When Does an Observation Favor One Hypothesis Over Another Hypothesis? The Law of Likelihood -- 5.3 When Should We Up Our Confidence in a Hypothesis? Incremental Confirmation -- 5.4 How Can We Determine the Net Plausibility of a Hypothesis? Bayes’ Theorem and Posterior Probabilities -- 5.5 Which of Two Hypotheses is More Probable than the Other? Principle of Contrastive Posterior Probabilities -- 5.6 When Does Evidence Justify Believing a Hypothesis? Principle of Absolute Confirmation -- 5.7 Survivalist Confusions about Bayesian Analyses -- 5.8 The Washing Out of Priors -- 5.9 The Subjectivism Objection -- 5.10 Summing Up Insights from Confirmation Theory -- 6. Back to Braude 7. Varieties of Skepticism 8. Neurophysiological Evidence and the Survival Hypothesis 9. The Data from Mediumship 10. The Alleged Improbability of Fraud and Other Counterexplanations 11. Mediumship and the Logic of Confirmation 12. The Significance of Failed Tests 13. Survivalist Rescues and Contrastive Confirmation 14. Evidential Support without Predictions -- 15. The Testability Problem -- Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 280-298, October 2021.

This paper concerns recent attempts to use the epistemological notions of sensitivity and safety to shed light on legal debates about so-called “bare” statistical evidence. These notions might be thought to explain either the outright inadmissibility of such evidence or its inadequacy for a finding of fact—two different phenomena that are often discussed in tandem, but that, I insist, we do better to keep separate. I argue that neither sensitivity nor safety can hope to explain statistical evidence’s inadmissibility, since neither (...) offers a plausible criterion of admissibility that would exclude such evidence; both are subject to copious counterexamples, especially given their factivity, and it is difficult even to state a coherent criterion of admissibility in terms of either sensitivity or safety. The possibility remains, though, that either notion might explain statistical evidence’s inadequacy for a finding of fact; I express some doubts about this possibility but do not rule it out. (shrink)

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 146-166, October 2021.