This article is a contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship addressing the presumption of innocence, especially interdisciplinary conversations between philosophers and jurists. Terminological confusion and methodological traps and errors notoriously beset academic literature addressing the presumption of innocence and related concepts, such as evidentiary presumptions, and the burden and standard of proof in criminal trials. This article is diagnostic, in the sense that its primary objective is to highlight the assumptions—in particular, the disciplinary assumptions—implicit in influential contributions to debates on the presumption (...) of innocence. It advocates a methodologically pluralistic approach, according to which definitions of the presumption of innocence are necessarily sensitive to purpose and method. These relationships and their implications are not always appreciated, and are seldom explicitly elucidated. Notably, philosophers routinely treat the presumption of innocence as epistemic, evidentiary or otherwise featuring directly in practical reasoning. This article identifies jurisprudential and practical reasons why legal scholars and practitioners concerned with criminal procedure and evidence should reject evidentiary interpretations of the presumption of innocence. By encouraging finer-grained engagement with the history and institutional details of common law procedural traditions, the article aims to show why legal scholars might think that philosophical approaches to the presumption of innocence are already methodologically-loaded and, for our purposes, address the wrong questions with deficient concepts. (shrink)

Most people who believe in temporal parts believe that the referents of our ordinary referring terms, like Bill Clinton, or that table, are fusions of temporal parts from past, present and future times. Call these fusions worms, and the theory that the referents of ordinary referring terms (ordinary objects) the worm theory. Buying the metaphysical theory of temporal parts does not immediately imply that we must buy the worm theory. Theodore Sider (1996, 2000), for example, has suggested that these ordinary (...) referring terms just pick out a single, instantaneous, temporal part. Sider’s theory, called the stage theory, solves some pressing philosophical problems, including the problem of temporary intrinsics. But the stage theory has several difficulties of its own, especially what I will call the problem of long-term intrinsics. I argue for a rival theory, the growing individuals theory. On this theory, the referents of our ordinary referring terms have past and present temporal parts, but not future temporal parts. This theory best accounts for our intuitions about which intrinsic properties ordinary objects have. (shrink)