The ideal of objectivity is in crisis in science and the law, and yet it continues to do important work in both practices. This article describes that crisis and develops a shared rescue strategy for objectivity in both domains. In a recent article, Inkeri Koskinen attempts to bring unity to the fragmented discourse on objectivity in the philosophy of science with a risk account of objectivity. To put it simply, she argues that we call practitioners, processes, and products (...) of science objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic risks. We endorse this view and attempt to tailor Koskinen's strategy to the problem of objectivity in the legal context. To do so, we develop a novel notion of phronetic risk, and argue that we call practitioners, processes, and products of law objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic and/or phronetic risks. Our attempt to rescue objectivity is especially important for work at the intersection of law and psychiatry. For that intersection represents a place where skeptical worries about objectivity in science and law work in tandem to pose serious critical challenges to contemporary practice; and our rescue strategy represents a promising way to negotiate those challenges. (shrink)

This book proposes a new institutional constructivist model, for social scientific and legal enquiries, based on the interrelations within the social and political world and the application of change in EU laws and politics. Much of the research conducted in social sciences and law examines the diverse activities of individuals and collectivities and the role of institutions in the social and political world. Although there exist many vantage points from which one can gain entry into understanding how agents in the (...) world act, interact, shape and bear the world, socio-legal scientific epistemology has found monism and dualism to be convincing models. This book argues that current models do not capture the complexity of our micro-worlds, macro-worlds and meso-worlds. Nor can they account for the forms and patterns of socio-legal change. Mind, time and change are brought together in an attempt to contribute to socio-legal epistemology and to enhance its toolkit. (shrink)

Although science and law employ different methods to gather and weigh evidence, their conclusions are remarkably convergent with regard to the effect that workplace stress has on the health of employees. Science, using the language of probability, affirms that certain stressors predict adverse health outcomes such as disabling anxiety and depression, cardiovascular disease, certain types of injury, and a variety of immune system disorders. Law, using the language of reasonable foreseeability, affirms that these adverse outcomes are predictable under (...) certain conditions, typically defined in relation to what a reasonable person should know. Society is arguably in a position to establish standards for the abatement of certain types of workplace stress. As part of this process, we need to conceptualize an ideal form of conduct that exemplifies the standards to which both law and science urge us to aspire. For this purpose, the concept of the neighbor at work is proposed. (shrink)

Respon'sible, liable to be called to account or render satisfaction: answerable: capable of discharging duty: able to pay. The old Chambers's dictionary gives a behavioristic view of responsibility: in terms of action, not thought or belief. “Lust in the heart” is not equated to lust in flagrante. It is this view I shall explore in this essay, rather than the more subjective notion of moral responsibility, as in, “I feel moral responsibility for not doing anything to save the Tutsis [Hutus, (...) ethnic Albanians, etc.].” My presumption is that responsibility implies capability: you cannot be held responsible for something over which you have no control. There is obviously uncertainty in some cases—where control is less than total, where the degree of potential control depends on our own efforts, where we cannot know if we have control until we try to exert it, etc. The relation between responsibility and degree of control is a separate topic which I shall not treat here. (shrink)

Drinking water quality has drawn enormous attention from scientific communities, the industrial sector, and the common public in several countries during the last couple of decades. The scholarship in science and technology studies somehow overlooked this crucial domain. This article attempts to contribute to this gray area by exploring how drinking water quality is understood in Indian water policies, laws, and courtrooms. The article argues that water policies and laws in India were significantly shaped by international treaties and global (...) environmental stewardship. In the courtrooms, the Indian judiciary employed minimum science-based evidence in decision making in the context of drinking water–related cases; rather they used a rights-based approach and minimally engaged with the issue of drinking water quality/standards. Whatever little science used as valid science by the judges in the decision making was entirely expert-based. The reliance of the judges on the scientific expertise of the experts representing regulatory organizations and public institutions was another unique characteristic of the relationship between science and law in India. (shrink)

In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court made its first major pronouncement on the evaluation of scientific evidence, calling on judges to act as gatekeepers for scientific knowledge and validity, despite lack of scientific training among judges. Daubert offers the science studies community a case study for examining how judges engage in boundary-work and construct scientific validity. In constructing scientific validity under Daubert, judges must evaluate the scientific method behind a particular scientific claim, and will (...) look to the parties' experts and the relevant scientific community for assistance. To combat the oft-cited problem of the battle of the experts, judges may be tempted to obtain assistance from court-appointed neutral experts, an inquisitorial system in the civil law tradition of many European countries. The judicial evaluation of scientific evidence, the resulting construction of scientific validity, and the push for a greater use of court-appointed experts reveal judges' desire to segregate "objective" scientific facts from aspects of the legal process that are infused with adversaries' values. Yet the scientific and judicial construction of validity mixes empirical results and research methods with the personal, political, and institutional values of judges and scientists. (shrink)

Because its business is to resolve disputed issues, the law very often calls on those fields of science where the pressure of commercial interests is most severe. Because the legal system aspires to handle disputes promptly, the scientific questions to which it seeks answers will often be those for which all the evidence is not yet in. Because of its case-specificity, the legal system often demands answers of a kind science is not well-equipped to supply; and, for related (...) reasons, constitutes virtually the entire market for certain fields of forensic science and for certain psychiatric specialties. Because of its adversarial character, the law tends to draw in scientists who are more willing than most to give an opinion on less-than-overwhelming evidence; and the more often such a witness testifies, the more unbudgeably confident he may become in his opinion. Legal rules can make it impossible to bring potentially useful scientific information to light, and the legal penchant for “indicia” and the like can transform scientific subtleties into legal shibboleths. And because of its concern for precedent, and the desideratum of finality, the law sometimes lags behind scientific advances. (shrink)

Interest in science and math plays an important role in encouraging STEM motivation and career aspirations. This interest decreases for girls between late childhood and adolescence. Relatedly, positive mentoring experiences with female teachers can protect girls against losing interest. The present study examines whether visitors to informal science learning sites differ in their expressed science and math interest, as well as their science and math stereotypes following an interaction with either a male or female educator. Participants (...) were visitors to one of four ISLS in the United States and United Kingdom. Following an interaction with a male or female educator, they reported their math and science interest and responded to math and science gender stereotype measures. Female participants reported greater interest in math following an interaction with a female educator, compared to when they interacted with a male educator. In turn, female participants who interacted with a female educator were less likely to report male-biased math gender stereotypes. Self-reported science interest did not differ as a function of educator gender. Together these findings suggest that, when aiming to encourage STEM interest and challenge gender stereotypes in informal settings, we must consider the importance of the gender of educators and learners. (shrink)

Excerpt from Science and Ethics: Being a Series of Six Lectures Delivered Under the Auspices of the Natural Law Research League And abroad (germany, France, America, but although within the circumscribed limits of these lectures I have not. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format (...) whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

There is tension between the adversarialism of the U.S. legal culture and the investigative procedures of the sciences, and between the law's concern for finality and the open‐ended fallibilism of science. A long history of attempts to domesticate scientific testimony by legal rules of admissibility has left federal judges with broad screening responsibilities; recent adaptations of adversarialism in the form of court‐appointed experts have been criticized as “inquisitorial,” even “undemocratic.” In exploring their benefits and disadvantages, it would make sense (...) to look to the experience of other legal systems. (shrink)

This paper explores a colonial controversy: the imposition of state rules to limit salmon fishing in a Scandinavian subarctic river. These rules reflect biological fish population models intended to preserve salmon populations, but this river has also been fished for centuries by indigenous Sámi people who have their own different practices and knowledges of the river and salmon. In theory, the Norwegian state recognizes traditional ecological knowledge and includes this in its biological assessments, but in practice this does not happen, (...) so Sámi fishing practices and the realities that they enact are disappearing. This paper explores how to conceptualize colonial differences in knowing. Drawing on recent anthropology, it asks how “settler” and “nomadic” enact worlds and their realities, suggesting that, unlike the latter, the former create a single reality intolerant of alternatives. The focus is thus on a “politics of how” and the ways in which colonial realities and knowledges might intersect less destructively. (shrink)

This article aims to address challenges of translating emerging scientific technologies into legal terms and incorporate them into the existing North American regulatory regimes. A lack of full scientific knowledge about nanomedicine technologies results in the lack of development in legal discourse to describe products and to clearly set legal standards on their safety and efficacy. The increasing complexity and hybrid nature of technologies negatively impact the functionality of “law in action” leading to a legal uncertainty and ultimately to a (...) public distrust. Nanomedicine is an illustrative example of how law lags behind increasingly fast-paced scientific technologies making it difficult to find a balance between innovation and safety. This article argues that the boundary crossing nature of nanomedicine through different domains of science triggers a methodological and epistemological debate within science and law, suggesting that a critical revision is required in our traditional methods to learn, create, and categorize knowledge from breakthrough scientific advances. The highly disruptive nature of nanomedicine places stress on traditional conceptual frameworks, classifications of knowledge, and existing regulations. The legal challenge to identify definitions or to classify nanoapplications brings to light a conceptual vacuum surrounding nanomedicine. Moving away from confusing policies and obsolete classificatory models, this article suggests to undertake changes that are only the first steps of a more in-depth “epistemological transformation” that addresses knowledge as the process of not only gathering data, but also, as the process of elaborating new conceptual bases to better fulfill the legal language and facilitate the legal task of finding definitions and formulating criteria more adherent with scientific advances. This should compel regulators to explore new paradigms and develop new methodologies to evaluate data on nanomedicine applications in order to provide sustainable bases for a responsible development of nanomedicine. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper responds to the question posed in the announcement of the conference at Brooklyn Law School at which it was presented: if and how [the inquiry into the reliability of proffered scientific testimony mandated by Daubert] relates to 'truth,' and whose view of the truth should prevail. The first step is to sketch the legal history leading up to Daubert, and to explore some of the difficulties Daubert brought in its wake; the next, to develop an account of (...) truth in the sciences that combines a full acknowledgment of the fallibility and incompleteness of the scientific enterprise with a robustly objective conception of truth - which helps us understand why the legal system often gets less than the best out of science; and finally, exploring the concept of legal truth, to show how false scientific clams sometimes get entrenched as legally reliable. (shrink)

In this paper, the author intends to present an approach against lengthy contracts, judgements, and pleadings. He describes the advantages of brevity, conciseness, and plain English, focusing on research in Israel and abroad. An extreme example of how a whole page may be condensed into one sentence is provided by the author, as well as the opinion of a Supreme Court Chief Justice regarding methods to be used in writing good judgments, and a lawyer’s proposal to summarize pleadings. In the (...) second part of this paper, the author briefly illustrates the differences between three disciplines: Law, Business Administration, and Social Sciences. He proposes that the Law should examine and adopt several elements from other disciplines that can have a positive impact on legal language. (shrink)

The author characterizes the model of rationality devised by critical rationalism in opposition to the classic model of rationality and as an alternative to this. He illustrates and criticizes the trichotomous theory of knowledge which, going back to Max Scheler, is received in a secularized version by Habermas and Apel, also under the influence of the hermeneutic tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer and of the so-called “critical theory” of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. The author criticizes historicism as it expects (...) to be an alternative to naturalism and not to make use of the method based on scientific laws. The author proposes as an example of technological social science the model developed in economics starting from Adam Smith. With regard to legal theories, natural law is rejected because of its sociomorphic cosmology. It is proposed that legal science as social technology has two parts. One part aims at efficient interpretations of valid law (for the space-time region concerned) and a second part aims at the construction of efficient norms for the modification of valid law by legislation. (shrink)

In the 20th century, public health was responsible for most of the 30-year increase in average life expectancy in the United States.1 Most of the significant advances in public health required the combined effort of scientists and attorneys. Scientists identified public health threats and the means of controlling them, but attorneys and policymakers helped convert those scientific discoveries into laws that could change the behavior of industries or individuals at a population level. In tobacco control, public health scientists made the (...) groundbreaking discovery that smoking caused lung cancer, but attorneys and policymakers developed and implemented the policies and litigation strategies that helped reduce smoking rates by more than half over the past 50 years. (shrink)

This book engages the field of practice theory in order to consider law as a social practice. Taking up the theoretical concept of practices, the contributors to this volume maintain that law can be fruitfully understood as one among other social practices. Including perspectives from philosophers of language, experts in practice theory, linguists and legal philosophers, the book examines the twin questions of what it means for law to be considered a practice, and what law's place is among other social (...) practices. The book is comprised of three parts. The first provides a broad methodological framework for discussing how the concept of practice is used in the social sciences, and in law. The second deals with specific problems arising from the use of the concept of practice in the legal context, and from the intersection of different social practices. The third part identifies and addresses the consequences of applying insights from practice theory to law. Together, they offer a comprehensive consideration of what is at stake in understanding law as a social practice. This book will appeal to sociolegal scholars, sociologists of law, philosophers of language and action, as well as philosophers of law and legal theorists. (shrink)

Natural Law, Science, and the Social Construction of Reality looks at changes in knowledge and the relationship to values from the modern era to today. Author Bernie Koenig examines Newton's influence on Locke and Kant, how Kant influenced Darwin and Freud, and the implications of their work for both anthropology and moral theory.

This article elaborates an interpretive and polemic on the study of law, starting from different coordinates to that of legal science in order to postulate an alternative to the understanding of law. For this work, we problematize and detach ourselves from its valuation as a science. We take as a basis the philosophical orientation that views science from the materialistic perspective of the Theory of Categorial Closure, in order to subsequently examine and conceive law as a techno-praxis (...) in relation to the three-dimensional theory as a conceptual framework, thus allowing to consolidate an usable project at the service of the legal researcher. (shrink)

The use of evidence to resolve uncertainties is key to many endeavours, most conspicuously science and law. Despite this, the logic of uncertainty is seldom taught explicitly, and often seems misunderstood. Traditional educational practice even fails to encourage students to identify uncertainty when they express knowledge, though mark schemes that reward the identification of reliable and uncertain responses have long been shown to encourage more insightful understanding. In our information-rich society the ability to identify uncertainty is often more important (...) than the possession of knowledge itself. In both science and law there are fundamentally different kinds of uncertainty at issue. There is uncertainty whether a particular hypothesis is correct, and there is uncertainty about observable data that may be generated if a particular hypothesis is correct. Both are expressed in terms of probabilities. Each has its own domain of application and its own logic, but the inter-relationship is complex and sometimes misunderstood. Hypothesis probabilities are always open to error through possible failure to take account of realistic alternatives, while the proper inferences that can be drawn from data probabilities (often in the context of significance testing) are quite limited and easily over-interpreted. When considering these two kinds of probability in a court of law it is possible to interpret the phrase 'reasonable doubt' in different ways. It can be seen as addressing data uncertainty: whether such incriminating evidence might with reasonable probability arise to confront an innocent person. Or (the more conventional view) it can be seen as some sort of threshold level on the probability that the defendant is guilty (a hypothesis probability). Each typically involves elements of subjective judgement, but fewer issues and uncertainties arise when considering the data probability and it is argued that this is often the more critical and proper issue for a jury to address. This has particular repercussions for cases involving identification of a suspect through trawl of a DNA or other database. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this we explore some of the ways in which a state scientific laboratory (Daresbury SERC) reacted to the rtetoric and forces of the marketpace in the 1980s. We describe laboratory attempts to create what we call “good customers” while converting itself into a “good seller” by developing a particulat set of costing practicting that were closely related to the implementation of a management accounting system. Finally, we consider how Daresbury response to “market forces” influenced scintific and organzational practice, (...) and arsponse that the social technologies of governmentality performed by accountancy — but also by scientific and bureaucratic practice are complex, discursively heterogeneou, and used in context-sensitive ways. This means, or so we suggest, that it is difficult to mount general argunents about “science” and “the market,” and that the use of such large-scale institions impedes impedes analysis. (shrink)

Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects—such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes—or, as they are known in biology, “model systems.” Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that (...) have played a role comparable to that of biology’s model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities. Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth’s crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars—from the fruit fly to Freud’s Dora—shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines. Contributors Rachel A. Ankeny Angela N. H. Creager Amy Dahan Dalmedico John Forrester Clifford Geertz Carlo Ginzburg E. Jane Albert Hubbard Elizabeth Lunbeck Mary S. Morgan Josiah Ober Naomi Oreskes Susan Sperling Marcel Weber M. Norton Wise. (shrink)

��This article reviews a theory of explanatory coherence that provides a psychologically plausible account of how people evaluate competing explanations. The theory is implemented in a computational model that uses simple artificial neural networks to simulate many important cases of scientific and legal reasoning. Current research directions include extensions to emotional thinking and implementation in more biologically realistic neural networks.

Volume 13, Issue 2, May 2019, Page 259-265.

Staying for an answer : the untidy process of groping for truth -- The same, only different -- The unity of truth and the plurality of truths -- Coherence, consistency, cogency, congruity, cohesiveness, &c. : remain calm! don't go overboard! -- Not cynicism, but synechism : lessons from classical pragmatism -- Science, economics, "vision" -- The integrity of science : what it means, why it matters -- Scientific secrecy and "spin" : the sad, sleazy story of the trials (...) of remune -- Truth and justice, inquiry and advocacy, science and law -- Trial and error : the Supreme Court's philosophy of science -- An epistemologist among the epidemiologists -- Fallibilism and faith, naturalism and the supernatural, science and religion -- The ideal of intellectual integrity, in life and literature -- After my own heart : Dorothy Sayers's feminism -- Worthwhile lives -- Why I am not an oxymoron -- Formal philosophy? : a plea for pluralism. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a recent case in which a court, like the Daubert Court, was asked to demarcate legitimate from illegitimate science. The court was the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and it was asked by the state of Australia to find the state of Japan in violation of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling because of its licensing of a research program that engaged in killing whales ostensibly “for purposes of scientific research.” Australia premised a good (...) portion of its argument on a four-part definition of “scientific research,” reminiscent of the four notorious “Daubert criteria,” and the claim that the Japanese research program, “JARPA II,” failed to comply with this definition. The paper suggests that the Court’s judgment, which forced Japan to temporarily cease whaling, illustrates the merits for courts of avoiding the temptation to engage in demarcation exercises. (shrink)

Many reports independently confirm that even more than a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the results of research and development in those countries that were under its influence are insufficient in comparison to the rest of the world. Given that human intelligence is not distributed unevenly and that science is a powerful driving force for the future of an economy, there is a hidden problem, which, if it can be resolved, may release great (...) economic potential. The first generation of researchers from Armenia, Czech Republic, Georgia, Slovakia and Ukraine, who successfully completed their education after the political revolution, were surveyed. The survey revealed many similarities with regards to ethics, but that there is mounting evidence that the main cause of the current situation is the state of the local legal systems. The conclusion was drawn that a conceptual change in staffing within the relevant legal systems is required to release potential and stimulate wealth creation. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of _Causalite´ et Lois de La Nature,_ and is an important contribution to the theory of causation_._ Max Kistler reconstructs a unified concept of causation that is general enough to adequately deal with both elementary physical processes, and the macroscopic level of phenomena we encounter in everyday life. This book will be of great interest to philosophers of science and metaphysics, and also to students and scholars of philosophy of mind where concepts of (...) causation and law play a prominent role. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify some of the logical and conceptual issues in the philosophical dispute about law that has pitted the legal positivists against the adherents of natural law. The first part looks at the basic concepts that are relevant to that discussion and at the methodological implications of studying law either as an order of natural persons (natural law) or as a system of rules or an order of rule-defined artificial persons (legal order). Thus, we find that the (...) material and formal objects of natural law studies and legal science are different, and only touch one another because of the contingent fact that most of the positions in the legal orders studied by positivists are occupied by natural persons. Consequently, from both the logical and the methodological points of view, natural law studies and legal studies are not rivals. The two can exist side by side and have done so for centuries. One question that emerges from analysis in the first part is why positivists have embraced the study of legal orders while heaping nothing but scorn on the study of natural law. Their attitude suggests hatred and contempt rather than a mere difference of intellectual interests. Could it be that the positivists’ attitude has little to do with logic and methodology and much with ideological issues involving fundamental values? In the second part, we look for an answer to this question in a comparison of the two major and radically opposed religious worldviews that have made their mark on Western intellectual history, the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Gnostic tradition. (shrink)