Justification, coherence, and epistemic responsibility in legal fact-finding

Episteme 5 (3):pp. 306-319 (2008)
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Abstract

This paper argues for a coherentist theory of the justification of evidentiary judgments in law, according to which a hypothesis about the events being litigated is justified if and only if it is such that an epistemically responsible fact-finder might have accepted it as justified by virtue of its coherence in like circumstances. It claims that this version of coherentism has the resources to address a main problem facing coherence theories of evidence and legal proof, namely, the problem of the coherence bias. The paper then develops an aretaic approach to the standards of epistemic responsibility which govern legal fact-finding. It concludes by exploring some implications of the proposed account of the justification of evidentiary judgments in law for the epistemology of legal proof

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Amalia Amaya
National Autonomous University Of Mexico

References found in this work

The structure of empirical knowledge.Laurence BonJour - 1985 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Inference to the Best Explanation.Peter Lipton - 1991 - London and New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group.
Law’s Empire.Ronald Dworkin - 1986 - Harvard University Press.
Judgement and justification.William G. Lycan - 1988 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

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