Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. The sensitivity of legal proof.Guido Melchior - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-23.
    The proof paradox results from conflicting intuitions concerning different types of fallible evidence in a court of law. We accept fallible individual evidence but reject fallible statistical evidence even when the conditional probability that the defendant is guilty given the evidence is the same, a seeming inconsistency. This paper defends a solution to the proof paradox, building on a sensitivity account of checking and settling a question. The proposed sensitivity account of legal proof not only requires sensitivity simpliciter but sensitivity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Do Your Homework! A Rights-Based Zetetic Account of Alleged Cases of Doxastic Wronging.J. Spencer Atkins - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:1-28.
    This paper offers an alternate explanation of cases from the doxastic wronging literature. These cases violate what I call the degree of inquiry right—a novel account of zetetic obligations to inquire when interests are at stake. The degree of inquiry right is a moral right against other epistemic agents to inquire to a certain threshold when a belief undermines one’s interests. Thus, the agents are sometimes obligated to leave inquiry open. I argue that we have relevant interests in reputation, relationships, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Just probabilities.Chad Lee-Stronach - 2024 - Noûs 58 (4):948-972.
    I defend the thesis that legal standards of proof are reducible to thresholds of probability. Many reject this thesis because it appears to permit finding defendants liable solely on the basis of statistical evidence. To the contrary, I argue – by combining Thomson's (1986) causal analysis of legal evidence with formal methods of causal inference – that legal standards of proof can be reduced to probabilities, but that deriving these probabilities involves more than just statistics.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Doxastic Affirmative Action.Andreas Bengtson & Lauritz Aastrup Munch - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (2):203-220.
    According to the relational egalitarian theory of justice, justice requires that people relate as equals. To relate as equals, many relational egalitarians argue, people must (i) regard each other as equals, and (ii) treat each other as equals. In this paper, we argue that, under conditions of background injustice, such relational egalitarians should endorse affirmative action in the ways in which (dis)esteem is attributed to people as part of the regard-requirement for relating as equals.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Knowledge and Prizes.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - forthcoming - In Artūrs Logins & Jacques Henri Vollet (eds.), Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    We examine two leading theories of rational belief, the Lockean view and the explanationist view. The first is appealing because it fits with some independently plausible claims about the ways that rational persons pursue their aims. The second is appealing because it seems to account for intuitions that cause trouble for the Lockean view. While fitting the intuitive data is desirable, we are troubled that the explanationist view seems to clash with our theoretical beliefs about what rationality must be like. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • What is Rational Belief?Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2024 - Noûs 58 (2):333-359.
    A theory of rational belief should get the cases right. It should also reach its verdicts using the right theoretical assumptions. Leading theories seem to predict the wrong things. With only one exception, they don't accommodate principles that we should use to explain these verdicts. We offer a theory of rational belief that combines an attractive picture of epistemic desirability with plausible principles connecting desirability to rationality. On our view, it's rational to believe when it's sufficiently likely that you'd know (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • The safe, the sensitive, and the severely tested: a unified account.Georgi Gardiner & Brian Zaharatos - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-33.
    This essay presents a unified account of safety, sensitivity, and severe testing. S’s belief is safe iff, roughly, S could not easily have falsely believed p, and S’s belief is sensitive iff were p false S would not believe p. These two conditions are typically viewed as rivals but, we argue, they instead play symbiotic roles. Safety and sensitivity are both valuable epistemic conditions, and the relevant alternatives framework provides the scaffolding for their mutually supportive roles. The relevant alternatives condition (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • A Disjunctive Argument Against Conjoining Belief Impermissivism and Credal Impermissivism.Mark Satta - 2022 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):625-640.
    In this paper, I offer reasons to conclude that either belief impermissivism or credal impermissivism is false. That is to say, I argue against the conjunction of belief impermissivism and credal impermissivism. I defend this conclusion in three ways. First, I show what I take to be an implausible consequence of holding that for any rational credence in p, there is only one correlating rational belief-attitude toward p, given a body of evidence. Second, I provide thought experiments designed to support (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Foundations of Criminal Law Epistemology.Lewis Ross - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    Legal epistemology has been an area of great philosophical growth since the turn of the century. But recently, a number of philosophers have argued the entire project is misguided, claiming that it relies on an illicit transposition of the norms of individual epistemology to the legal arena. This paper uses these objections as a foil to consider the foundations of legal epistemology, particularly as it applies to the criminal law. The aim is to clarify the fundamental commitments of legal epistemology (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Standards and values.Matthew Kotzen - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):167-187.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 167-187, October 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Grounding legal proof.Michael S. Pardo - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):280-298.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 280-298, October 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • When statistical evidence is not specific enough.Marcello Di Bello - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12251-12269.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Eleven angry men.Clayton Littlejohn - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):227-239.
    While many of us would not want to abandon the requirement that a defendant can only be found guilty of a serious criminal offence by a unanimous jury, we should not expect epistemology to give us the resources we need for justifying this requirement. The doubts that might prevent jurors from reaching unanimity do not show that, say, the BARD standard has not been met. Even if it were true, as some have suggested, that rationality requires that a jury composed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Justice in epistemic gaps: The ‘proof paradox’ revisited.Lewis Ross - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):315-333.
    This paper defends the heretical view that, at least in some cases, we ought to assign legal liability based on purely statistical evidence. The argument draws on prominent civil law litigation concerning pharmaceutical negligence and asbestos-poisoning. The overall aim is to illustrate moral pitfalls that result from supposing that it is never appropriate to rely on bare statistics when settling a legal dispute.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • De Re Beliefs and Evidence in Legal Cases.Samuel J. Thomas - 2021 - Dissertation, Arizona State University
    For the past half-century, both jurisprudence and epistemology have been haunted by questions about why individual evidence (i.e., evidence which picks out a specific individual) can sufficiently justify a guilty or liable verdict while bare statistical evidence (i.e., statistical evidence which does not pick out a specific individual) does not sufficiently justify such a verdict. This thesis examines three popular justifications for such a disparity in verdicts – Judith Jarvis Thomson’s causal account, Enoch et al.’s sensitivity account, and Sarah Moss’ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Profiling, Neutrality, and Social Equality.Lewis Ross - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (4):808-824.
    I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • More on Normic Support and the Criminal Standard of Proof.Martin Smith - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):943-960.
    In this paper I respond to Marcello Di Bello’s criticisms of the ‘normic account’ of the criminal standard of proof. In so doing, I further elaborate on what the normic account predicts about certain significant legal categories of evidence, including DNA and fingerprint evidence and eyewitness identifications.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Legal proof and statistical conjunctions.Lewis D. Ross - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (6):2021-2041.
    A question, long discussed by legal scholars, has recently provoked a considerable amount of philosophical attention: ‘Is it ever appropriate to base a legal verdict on statistical evidence alone?’ Many philosophers who have considered this question reject legal reliance on bare statistics, even when the odds of error are extremely low. This paper develops a puzzle for the dominant theories concerning why we should eschew bare statistics. Namely, there seem to be compelling scenarios in which there are multiple sources of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Relationship Between Belief and Credence.Elizabeth Jackson - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (6):e12670.
    This guide accompanies the following article(s): Jackson, E., Philosophy Compass 15/6 (2020) pp. 1-13 10.1111/phc3.12668.x.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Do you see what I know? On reasons, perceptual evidence, and epistemic status.Clayton Littlejohn - 2020 - Philosophical Issues 30 (1):205-220.
    Our epistemology can shape the way we think about perception and experience. Speaking as an epistemologist, I should say that I don’t necessarily think that this is a good thing. If we think that we need perceptual evidence to have perceptual knowledge or perceptual justification, we will naturally feel some pressure to think of experience as a source of reasons or evidence. In trying to explain how experience can provide us with evidence, we run the risk of either adopting a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Relevance and risk: How the relevant alternatives framework models the epistemology of risk.Georgi Gardiner - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):481-511.
    The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where those consequences (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • The Relationship Between Belief and Credence.Elizabeth G. Jackson - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (6):1–13.
    Sometimes epistemologists theorize about belief, a tripartite attitude on which one can believe, withhold belief, or disbelieve a proposition. In other cases, epistemologists theorize about credence, a fine-grained attitude that represents one’s subjective probability or confidence level toward a proposition. How do these two attitudes relate to each other? This article explores the relationship between belief and credence in two categories: descriptive and normative. It then explains the broader significance of the belief-credence connection and concludes with general lessons from the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   52 citations  
  • Recent work on the proof paradox.Lewis D. Ross - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (6):e12667.
    Recent years have seen fresh impetus brought to debates about the proper role of statistical evidence in the law. Recent work largely centres on a set of puzzles known as the ‘proof paradox’. While these puzzles may initially seem academic, they have important ramifications for the law: raising key conceptual questions about legal proof, and practical questions about DNA evidence. This article introduces the proof paradox, why we should care about it, and new work attempting to resolve it.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • Legal Standards of Proof: When and Why Merely Statistical Evidence Can Satisfy Them.Paul Silva Jr - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    The relation of normic support offers a novel solution to the proof paradox: a paradox in evidence law arising from legal cases involving merely statistical evidence (Smith 2018). Central to the normic support solution has been the thesis that merely statistical evidence cannot confer normic support. However, it has been observed that there are exceptions to this: there exist cases where merely statistical evidence can give rise to normic support (Blome-Tillmann 2020). If correct, this fact seems to undermine the normic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Legal proof: why knowledge matters and knowing does not.Andy Mueller - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):1-22.
    I discuss the knowledge account of legal proof in Moss (2023) and develop an alternative. The unifying thread throughout this article are reflections on the beyond reasonable doubt (BRD) standard of proof. In Section 1, I will introduce the details of Moss’s account and how she motivates it via the BRD standard. In Section 2, I will argue that there are important disanalogies between BRD and knowledge that undermine Moss’s argument. There is however another motivation for the knowledge account: combined (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Corroboration.Georgi Gardiner - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2):131-148.
    Corroborating evidence supports a proposition that is already supported by other initial evidence. It bolsters or confirms the original body of evidence. Corroboration has striking psychological and epistemic force: It potently affects how people do and should assess the target proposition. This essay investigates the distinctive powers of corroborating evidence. Corroboration does not simply increase the quantifiable probability of the adjudicated claim. Drawing on the relevant alternatives framework, I argue that corroboration winnows remaining uneliminated error possibilities. This illuminates the independence, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Equalized Odds is a Requirement of Algorithmic Fairness.David Gray Grant - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3).
    Statistical criteria of fairness are formal measures of how an algorithm performs that aim to help us determine whether an algorithm would be fair to use in decision-making. In this paper, I introduce a new version of the criterion known as “Equalized Odds,” argue that it is a requirement of procedural fairness, and show that it is immune to a number of objections to the standard version.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)Criminal Proof: Fixed or Flexible?Lewis Ross - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly (4):1-23.
    Should we use the same standard of proof to adjudicate guilt for murder and petty theft? Why not tailor the standard of proof to the crime? These relatively neglected questions cut to the heart of central issues in the philosophy of law. This paper scrutinises whether we ought to use the same standard for all criminal cases, in contrast with a flexible approach that uses different standards for different crimes. I reject consequentialist arguments for a radically flexible standard of proof, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Justification, excuse, and proof beyond reasonable doubt.Hock Lai Ho - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):146-166.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 146-166, October 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Does legal epistemology rest on a mistake? On fetishism, two‐tier system design, and conscientious fact‐finding.David Enoch, Talia Fisher & Levi Spectre - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):85-103.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 85-103, October 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Evidence, Risk, and Proof Paradoxes: Pessimism about the Epistemic Project.Giada Fratantonio - 2021 - International Journal of Evidence and Proof:online first.
    Why can testimony alone be enough for findings of liability? Why statistical evidence alone can’t? These questions underpin the “Proof Paradox” (Redmayne 2008, Enoch et al. 2012). Many epistemologists have attempted to explain this paradox from a purely epistemic perspective. I call it the “Epistemic Project”. In this paper, I take a step back from this recent trend. Stemming from considerations about the nature and role of standards of proof, I define three requirements that any successful account in line with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Reasonable Doubt, Robust Evidential Probability and the Unknown.Hylke Jellema - 2024 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 18 (2):451-470.
    Most legal evidence scholars agree that proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt requires the belief that the defendant probably committed the alleged acts. However, they also agree that this is not a sufficient condition, as this belief may be unreasonable. I focus on two popular proposals for additional conditions: (i) that the degree of belief should be robust and (ii) that it should be reasonable given the available evidence (should be an evidential probability). Both criteria face difficulties regarding their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Game analogy in law reconsidered: is evidence at stake?Maciej Dybowski, Weronika Dzięgielewska & Wojciech Rzepiński - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-29.
    The aim of this paper is to show that the meaning and significance of legal evidence is being constituted throughout the course of a singular instance of legal proceedings. This is to be achieved by describing what legal agents _do_ while appealing to different propositions of fact and inferring from them throughout the course of legal proceedings. The authors claim that the process of applying the law is ultimately rooted in the inferential discursive practices of exchanging reasons on the part (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Knowledge‐norms in a common‐law crucible.Cosim Sayid - 2021 - Ratio 34 (4):261-276.
    Not only is the common‐law standard of proof of mere likelihood in ordinary civil cases justifiable, but its justifiability supports the conclusion that there is no general norm that one must assert that p only if p is known. An argument by Voltaire is formalized to show that the mere likelihood standard is rational. It is also shown that no applicable norm preempts the common‐law rule. An objection that takes the pertinent knowledge‐norm to be honoured in the breach is rejected (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Privacy rights and ‘naked’ statistical evidence.Lauritz Aastrup Munch - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (11):3777-3795.
    Do privacy rights restrict what is permissible to infer about others based on statistical evidence? This paper replies affirmatively by defending the following symmetry: there is not necessarily a morally relevant difference between directly appropriating people’s private information—say, by using an X-ray device on their private safes—and using predictive technologies to infer the same content, at least in cases where the evidence has a roughly similar probative value. This conclusion is of theoretical interest because a comprehensive justification of the thought (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • In defence of the modal account of legal risk.Duncan Pritchard - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-16.
    This paper offers an articulation and defence of the modal account of legal risk in light of a range of objections that have been proposed against this view in the recent literature. It is argued that these objections all trade on a failure to distinguish between the modal nature of risk more generally, and the application of this modal account to particular decision-making contexts, such as legal contexts, where one must rely on a restricted body of information. It is argued (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Reasonable Doubt from Unconceived Alternatives.Hylke Jellema - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):971-996.
    In criminal trials, judges or jurors have to decide whether the facts described in the indictment are proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, these decision-makers cannot always imagine every relevant sequence of events—there may be unconceived alternatives. The possibility of unconceived alternatives is an overlooked source of reasonable doubt. I argue that decision-makers should not consider the defendant’s guilt proven if they have good reasons to believe that plausible, unconceived scenarios exist. I explore this thesis through the lens of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Should Clergy be Exempt From Mandatory Reporting Laws?Levi Durham - 2024 - Public Affairs Quarterly 38 (4):330-349.
    Mandatory reporting laws are one of the main tools that governments in the US use to curb abuse. While clergy have historically been exempted from these laws, this privilege has increasingly come under fire. This essay argues a certain degree of clergy privilege is warranted. Specifically, it argues three main points. First, laws that require every adult to report credible evidence of abuse are problematic and ought to be repealed. Second, if religion is special, there should be widespread exemptions for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark