British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Are There Universal Principles or Forms of Evidential Inference?
Professor Peter Tillers
Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University
55 Fifth Avenue, New York, 10003, U.S.
An abstract presented to the conference
‘Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary conference’
at the British Academy, London, on 13 December 2007
Biography
Peter Tillers, B.A., 1966, Yale College; J.D., 1969, LL.M., 1972, Harvard Law School. Professor of Law, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University (U.S.). Tillers is a reviser of John Henry Wigmore's multi-volume treatise on the law of evidence and has published a variety of articles on evidence, inference, and investigation. He is coeditor of The Dynamics of Judicial Proof: Computation, Logic, and Common Sense, as well as Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence: The Uses and Limits of Bayesianism, which was recently published in Italian. He is an editor of the Oxford journal Law, Probability and Risk. Tillers is former chairman and secretary of the Evidence Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He was a Fellow of Law & Humanities at Harvard University and a Senior Max Rheinstein Fellow at the University of Munich. He was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in the spring semester of 2002. In March and April of 2008 he will be the Julius Stone Professorial Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales School of Law. Professor Tillers was legal advisor for the Latvian mission to the United Nations during the 48th Session of the General Assembly. He maintains a Web site at http://tillers.net/.
Abstract
Although interest in evidential inference is not new – interest in the topic reaches back into antiquity – during the last two or three decades there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship and research about evidential inference. Furthermore, evidential inference (or “factual inference”) is now an important topic in virtually every field of scholarship and in virtually every kind of “knowledge industry.” Although the models of inference generated in this latest wave of scholarship and research are varied, one thread does run through many of the new models. Many contemporary accounts emphasize the multistage nature of evidential inference; it is now very often argued or assumed that evidential inference is best viewed as a network or web of inferences Although the proponents of such models of evidential inference often have important disagreements about the properties or structure of multistage evidential inference, it is fair to say that such models generally rest on the compound proposition that real-world evidential inference usually or always consists of “atoms” that are linked together (in some way) by “generalizations.” If a model of this sort is a valid representation of evidential inference, the question may arise – the question has arisen – whether a model of this sort is or is not “universal.” The answer is that this question is unanswerable. What can be said is that when human beings (or other agents) configure problems of evidence in a certain way, inference networks (of some sort) are inevitable and describe the structure of the problem at hand but that when problems of evidence are perceived (only) in certain other ways, representations of inference as webs of factual hypotheses connected by generalizations are of little or no use – simply because in some situations such web-like patterns of reasoning do not address the problem at hand. For example, sometimes the question is not how strongly some evidentiary phenomenon supports some hypothesis but, rather, what sort of complex of hypotheses or conceptual constructs most persuasively explains some set of phenomena. This latter sort of problem sometimes requires a constructive and imaginative conceptual activity that does not much resemble an inference network or its ingredients.