Eyewitness testimony is a powerful form of evidence, and this is especially true in the United States criminal legal system. At the same time, eyewitness misidentification is the greatest contributing factor to wrongful convictions proven by DNA testing. In this paper, I offer a close examination of this tension between the enormous epistemic weight that eyewitness testimony is afforded in the United States criminal legal system and the fact that there are important questions about its reliability (...) as a source of evidence. In Sections 1 and 2, I argue that lineups and interrogations often function by way of extracting testimony from an eyewitness through practices that are manipulative, deceptive, or coercive. I then show, in Section 3, that when testimony that is extracted in these ways is given an unwarranted excess of credibility, the eyewitness in question is the victim of what I call agential testimonial injustice. I conclude that since much of the testimony of eyewitnesses is both extracted and given an excess of credibility, there is a fairly widespread form of epistemic injustice being inflicted upon testifiers in the United States criminal legal system. This calls for reforms along both dimensions—lineups and interrogations should go through a witness's epistemic agency, rather than bypassing, exploiting, or undermining it, and the weight of the resulting testimony should be viewed in the broader context of its significant fallibility. (shrink)

Eyewitness testimony is both an important and a notoriously unreliable type of criminal evidence. How should investigators, lawyers and decision-makers evaluate eyewitness reliability? In this article, I argue that Testimonial Inference to the Best Explanation is a promising, but underdeveloped prescriptive account of eyewitness evaluation. On this account, we assess the reliability of eyewitnesses by comparing different explanations of how their testimony came about. This account is compatible with, and complementary to both the Bayesian framework of (...) rational eyewitness evaluation and with prescriptive methods for eyewitness assessment developed by psychologists. Compared to these frameworks, the distinctive value of thinking in terms of competing explanations is that it helps us select, interpret and draw conclusions from the available evidence about the witness’s reliability. (shrink)

Regarding police procedures with alcohol-intoxicated witnesses, Swedish police officers have previously reported inconsistent and subjective decisions when interviewing these potentially vulnerable witnesses. Most officers have also highlighted the need for national policy guidelines aiding in conducting investigative interviews with intoxicated witnesses. The aims of the two studies presented here were to investigate whether police officers’ inconsistent interview decisions are attributable to a lack of research-based knowledge; their decision to interview, as well as their perceptions of the witnesses’ credibility could be (...) influenced by scientific research; and police officers decision-making and perceptions of witness credibility are biased by pre-existing social norms. In two separate randomized online experiments, police professionals and recruits watched a recorded fictive witness interview to which they were asked to rate the probability of interviewing the witness, the witness’ credibility, and to estimate the witness’ level of intoxication. Results showed that interview probability and perceived witness credibility were affected by witness intoxication level. While it cannot be stated definitely from the present research, these findings provided indications that police officers and recruits lacked research-based knowledge. Results also showed that interview probability, but not perceptions of credibility, was influenced by a research-based message. In line with research, interview probability for the most intoxicated witness increased after reading the message. Unexpectedly, neither interview probability nor witness credibility was affected by social norms. The current findings added to the legal psychology literature by showing that a breath alcohol concentration as low as.04% was enough for police officers and recruits to consider intoxicated witnesses less credible than sober witnesses. Findings also indicated that, despite the lower credibility assessment, police may have some understanding that these witnesses can be interviewed at low intoxication levels. However, this willingness to interview intoxicated witnesses ceased at a BrAC lower than the levels where research has found intoxicated witnesses as reliable as sober witnesses. Future directions for research and policy development as well as theoretical and practical implications of the present findings are discussed. (shrink)

Many oppose the use of profile evidence against defendants at trial, even when the statistical correlations are reliable and the jury is free from prejudice. The literature has struggled to justify this opposition. We argue that admitting profile evidence is objectionable because it violates what we call “equal protection”—that is, a right of innocent defendants not to be exposed to higher ex ante risks of mistaken conviction compared to other innocent defendants facing similar charges. We also show why (...) admitting other forms of evidence, such as eyewitness, trace, and motive evidence, does not violate equal protection. (shrink)

According to Scheck, Newfeld, and Dwyer (2000), there have been innumerable individuals wrongly convicted of a crime and sentenced to life imprisonment or to death based upon faulty evidence. The historical development of DNA evidence as a tool in the investigative process during the past 25 years is explained/analyzed, and the role of eyewitness evidence in the wrongful conviction of innocent individuals. This paper culminates in the Anthony Capozzi case study where eyewitness testimony wrongfully imprisoned (...) a man before the advent of DNA technology and which ultimately freed him years after the crime. The methodology used is the examination of journal articles, books, and newspaper articles on the phenomenon of wrongful convictions. (shrink)

Reports of anomalous experiences are to be found in all known societies, both historically and geographically. If these reports were accurate, they would constitute powerful evidence for the existence of paranormal forces. However, research into the fallibility of human memory suggests that we should be cautious in accepting such reports at face value. Experimental research has shown that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, including eyewitness testimony for anomalous events. The present paper also reviews recent research into susceptibility to (...) false memories and considers the relevance of such work for assessing reports of anomalous events. It is noted that a number of psychological variables that have been shown to correlate with susceptibility to false memories also correlate with the tendency to report paranormal and related anomalous experiences. Although attempts to show a direct link between tendency to report anomalous experiences and susceptibility to false memories have had only limited success to date, this may reflect the use of inappropriate measures. (shrink)

This article reviews contemporary response to several contrasting strands of recent empirical work. It begins with discussing the scope and rationale of evidence law. Experimental studies on eyewitness memory and testimony illustrate the potential value of empirical studies to the practice of investigations, prosecutions, and appeals. This article discusses several lines of empirical inquiry employing diverse methodologies, experiments, surveys, and approaches and reviews their limitations, and implications and significance for the understanding and practice of law. Many of the (...) contributions from empirical legal studies are provisional and their precise value for practice is uncertain or ambiguous, but they raise important issues worthy of serious consideration. By identifying problems with eyewitness evidence and the limitations of many of the forensic sciences, and in many other ways, empirical and experimental studies have substantially outpaced legal experience. Indifference to empirical legal study is likely to reduce the social legitimacy of legal institutions. (shrink)

Studying evidence law as part of naturalized epistemology means using the tools and results of the sciences to evaluate evidence rules based on the accuracy of the verdicts they are likely to produce. In this chapter, we introduce the approach and address skeptical concerns about the value of systematic empirical research for evidence scholarship, focusing, in particular, on worries about the external validity of jury simulation studies. Finally, turning to applications, we consider possible reforms regarding eyewitness (...) identifications and character evidence. (shrink)

Abstract. Suppose that the word of an eyewitness makes it 80% probable that A committed a crime, and that B is drawn from a population in which the incidence rate of that crime is 80%. Many philosophers and legal theorists have held that if this is our only evidence against those parties then (i) we may be justified in finding against A but not against B; but (ii) that doing so incurs a loss in the accuracy of our (...) findings. This paper argues against (ii). It argues that accuracy considerations can motivate taking different attitudes towards individualized and statistical evidence even across cases where they generate the same probability that the defendant is guilty. (shrink)

In some cases, there appears to be an asymmetry in the evidential value of statistical and more individualized evidence. For example, while I may accept that Alex is guilty based on eyewitness testimony that is 80% likely to be accurate, it does not seem permissible to do so based on the fact that 80% of a group that Alex is a member of are guilty. In this paper I suggest that rather than reflecting a deep defect in statistical (...) evidence, this asymmetry might arise from a general constraint on rational inquiry. Plausibly the degree of evidential support needed to justify taking a proposition to be true depends on the stakes of error. While relying on statistical evidence plausibly raises the stakes by introducing new kinds of risk to members of the reference class, paradigmatically `individualized' evidence---evidence tracing back to A's voluntary behavior---can lower the stakes. The net result explains the apparent evidential asymmetry without positing a deep difference in the brute justificatory power of different types of evidence. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify a debate on philosophical method, and to give a probabilistic argument vindicating armchair philosophy under a wide range of plausible assumptions. The use of intuitions by so-called armchair philosophers has been criticized on empirical grounds. The debate between armchair philosophers and their empirical critics would benefit from greater clarity and precision in our understanding of what it takes for intuition-based approaches to philosophy to make sense. This paper discusses a set of rigorous, probability-based tools for (...) determining what we can and cannot learn from intuitions in various conditions. These tools can tell us whether beliefs can be justified by armchair practices, and what empirical findings would have to show to undermine the use of intuitions in philosophy. Using these tools, the paper shows that armchair philosophy makes sense in a broad range of situations, and that it is quite plausible that we are in those situations at the moment. (shrink)

In the debate about the legal value of naked statistical evidence, Di Bello argues that (1) the likelihood ratio of such evidence is unknown, (2) the decision-theoretic considerations indicate that a conviction based on such evidence is unacceptable when expected utility maximization is combined with fairness constraints, and (3) the risk of mistaken conviction based on such evidence cannot be evaluated and is potentially too high. We argue that Di Bello’s argument for (1) works in a (...) rather narrow context, and that (1) is not exactly in line with the way expert witnesses are required to formulate their opinions. Consequently, Di Bello’s argument for (2), which assumes (1), does not apply uniformly to all convictions based on naked evidence. Moreover, if Di Bello’s analysis is correct, it applies also to eyewitness testimony, given empirical results about its quality, and so the distinctions drawn by DiBello cut across the distinction between naked statistical evidence and other types of evidence. Finally, if we weaken the rather strong requirement of precise measurability of the risk of mistaken conviction, to the availability of reasonable but imprecise and fallible estimates, many field and empirical studies show that often the risk of mistaken conviction based on naked statistical evidence can be estimated to a similar extent as the risk of mistaken conviction based on any other sort of evidence. (shrink)

Nurses in Ghana believe that training, practise, practitioner and policy reforms are required for total nursing profession reform to be effective. Their views for role reformation in the nursing profession, which is currently needed, are not only academic but also clinically relevant in the pursuit of health equity and quality nursing care. We explored and described nurses’ views on their roles in the profession using data collected from 24 professional nurses in three regional hospitals in Ghana. Using an inductive descriptive (...) qualitative design, data were gathered and analysed using a qualitative content analysis to describe the views of the nurses. Four major themes, namely practise reforms, practitioner reforms, training reforms and policy reforms have emerged in relation to role reformation in the nursing profession. Three strategic areas, practitioner attitudes, new training modalities and policy realignment, must be reviewed and remodelled for better positioning of the nursing profession before its entire role reformation. (shrink)

Contents \t\t\t\t\t \tTRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION \t\t1 \t \tNOTE ON THE TRANSLATION \t\t39 \t OBSERVATIONS ON THE FEELING OF THE BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME \t\t\t\t\t \tSECTION ONE: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Distinct Objects of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime \t\t45 \tSECTION TWO: \t\t\t\t \t\tOf the Attributes of the Beautiful and Sublime.

Smith argues that, unlike other forms of evidence, naked statistical evidence fails to satisfy normic support. This is his solution to the puzzles of statistical evidence in legal proof. This paper focuses on Smith’s claim that DNA evidence in cold-hit cases does not satisfy normic support. I argue that if this claim is correct, virtually no other form of evidence used at trial can satisfy normic support. This is troublesome. I discuss a few ways in (...) which Smith can respond. (shrink)

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.

Scientific evidence is often more reliable than other types of evidence commonly used in criminal trials – i.e., eyewitness identifications, confessions, and informant testimony. Nevertheless, despite its obvious value, forensic science has not always merited the term “science.” Three developments in the 1990s focused attention on its shortcomings: the advent of DNA profiling, the Supreme Court's “junk science” decision, and a number of wellpublicized crime laboratory scandals. In light of these developments, and in order to take full (...) advantage of the power of forensic science to aid in the search for truth, a number of reforms are needed: Crime laboratories should be accredited, lab procedures should be standardized, and basic research needs to be conducted on many commonly used techniques. Court procedures also require improvement: Defense experts should be more readily available to indigent defendants, and more comprehensive pretrial disclosure of the substance of expert testimony should be provided. (shrink)

The Death of the Past argues that critical problems in the philosophy of history, such as the the truth of historical texts, how texts relate to the past that they are about, and the nature of historical explanation, can be successfully investigated if we accept the claim that historical writing is historicist--perspectival (from the standpoint of the historian) rather than purporting to be like an eyewitness account (as in the first-person "presentist" views critiqued by Enzo Traverso). This approach admits (...) all relevant evidence as subject to analysis in order to determine the widest point of view, as opposed to the biased "eyewitness" approach, which observes only partially. The link between the past itself and historical knowledge is radically broken, giving the latter the wisdom of hindsight across a broader temporal field from the events examined up to the present. The truth about the past is only accessible from a later point in time; "the past" itself is not a reality for the historian; it no longer exists. Frank Ankersmit offers a surprising foundation for the historicist notion of history: Leibniz' monadological universe, in which each monad or substance has its own point of view. There is no deeper ontology to which they owe their status--just an infinity of monads and a corresponding infinity of points of view on other monads. So with historical representations, statements about the past that can be either true or false but not depictions of the past itself. In striking contrast to Hayden White's view, Ankersmit insists that historical writing is no less rational than the sciences-- mathematical and scientific writing has its counterpart in the writing of history. (shrink)

In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and (...) everything else), while others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists. (shrink)

Suppose one hundred prisoners are in a yard under the supervision of a guard, and at some point, ninety-nine of them collectively kill the guard. If, after the fact, a prisoner is picked at random and tried, the probability of his guilt is 99%. But despite the high probability, the statistical chances, by themselves, seem insufficient to justify a conviction. The question is why. Two arguments are offered. The first, decision-theoretic argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics (...) in the prisoner scenario is unacceptable so long as the goal of expected utility maximization is combined with fairness constraints. The second, risk-based argument shows that a conviction solely based on the statistics in the prisoner scenario lets the risk of mistaken conviction surge potentially too high. The same, by contrast, cannot be said of convictions solely based on DNA evidence or eyewitness testimony. A noteworthy feature of the two arguments in the paper is that they are not confined to criminal trials and can in fact be extended to civil trials. (shrink)

Given that conspiracies exist, can we be justified in dismissing conspiracy theories without concerning ourselves with specific details? I answer this question by focusing on contrarian conspiracy theories, theories about conspiracies that conflict with testimony from reliable sources of information. For example, theories that say the CIA masterminded the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11 was an inside job, or the Freemasons are secretly running the world are contrarian conspiracy theories. When someone argues for a contrarian conspiracy theory, their options (...) are to appeal to eyewitness testimony, incriminating documents, photographs, audio recordings, video recordings, allegedly scientific evidence, anomalies, or considerations of cui bono (who benefits). Most laypeople don’t know how to adequately respond to arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories, but this doesn’t mean that it’s dogmatic to reject them. I argue that many laypeople are defeasibly justified in rejecting a variety of contrarian conspiracy theories based on testimony and this justification is rarely defeated by arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories even if we don’t know how to respond to these arguments. (shrink)

The basic alternatives seem to be either a Humean reductionist view that any particular assertion needs backing with inductive evidence for its reliability before it can retionally be believed, or a Reidian criterial view that testimony is intrinscially, though defeasibly, credible, in the absence of evidence against its reliability.Some recent arguments from the constraints on interpreting any linguistic performances as assertions with propositional content have some force against the reductionist view. We thus have reason to accept the criterial (...) view, at least as applied to eyewitness reports. But these considerations do not establish that any rational enquirer must have the concept of other minds or testimony. The logical possibility of the lone enquirer, who uses symbols and thereby expresses some knowledge of his world, remains open — but it is a question we have no need to pronounce upon. (shrink)

Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause? To see what’s at stake, consider Mount Rushmore. The evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design is direct—eyewitnesses saw the sculptor Gutzon Borglum spend the better part of his life designing and building this structure. But what if there were no direct evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design? What if humans went (...) extinct and aliens, visiting the earth, discovered Mount Rushmore in substantially the same condition as it is now? (shrink)

The United States Supreme Court has long recognized the value of scientific evidence - especially when compared to other types of evidence such as eyewitness identifications, confessions, and informant testimony. For example, in Escobedo v. Illinois, the Court observed: “We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern, that a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a (...) system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.” Similarly, in Davis v. Mississippi, the Court commented:Detention for fingerprinting may constitute a much less serious intrusion upon personal security than other types of police searches and detentions. Fingerprinting involves none of the probing into an individual's private life and thoughts that marks an interrogation or search. Nor can fingerprint detention be employed repeatedly to harass any individual, since the police need only one set of each person's prints. Furthermore, fingerprinting is an inherently more reliable and effective crime-solving tool than eyewitness identifications or confessions and is not subject to such abuses as the improper line-up and the “third degree.”. (shrink)

Overgeneralizations by psychologists of the research evidence on memory and eyewitness testimony, such as “memory decays with time” or “memories are fluid and malleable,” are beginning to appear in legal judgements and guidance documents, accompanied by unwarranted disparagement of lay beliefs about memory. These overgeneralizations could have significant adverse consequences for the conduct of civil and criminal law.

This article describes some differences between familiar and unfamiliar face processing. It presents the evidence that unfamiliar face recognition is poor. Since this poor performance has implications both practically and theoretically, it is important to establish the facts. The article analyses reasons that people appear to have little insight into their own poor performance with unfamiliar faces, and some sectors of society seem so keen to use faces as a means of proving identity. It reviews some historical research comparing (...) familiar and unfamiliar face processing. The study shows evidence for the assertion that despite eliminating the memory-load of normal eyewitness situations, it turns out that people are surprisingly bad at matching two images of the same unfamiliar person. Finally, it suggests that the modern tendency to conflate familiar and unfamiliar face processing, and to theorize about “face recognition” in general, lies at the heart of practical failures in this field. (shrink)

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of "relativist" and "positivist" history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of "middle-voicedness" may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians (...) after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's "deep memory" and historical narrative.For finally, it may be the very idea of "deep memory" and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed "deep memory" of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that "What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history." That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, "How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?" Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events?In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call "received history"-a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings-both his telling and mine-on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind-my "vicarious past.". (shrink)

Klaming and Vedder (2010) have argued that enhancement technologies that improve the epistemic efficiency of the legal system (“epistemic enhancements”) would benefit the common good. But there are two flaws to Klaming and Vedder’s argument. First, they rely on an under-theorised and under-specified conception of the common good. When theory and specification are supplied, their CGJ for enhancing eyewitness memory and recall becomes significantly less persuasive. And second, although aware of such problems, they fail to give due weight and (...) consideration to the tensions between the individual and common good. Taking these criticisms onboard, this article proposes an alternative, and stronger, CGJ for epistemic enhancements. The argument has two prongs. Drawing from the literature on social epistemology and democratic legitimacy, it is first argued that there are strong grounds for thinking that epistemic enhancements are a desirable way to improve the democratic legitimacy of the legal system. This gives prima facie but not decisive weight to the CGJ. It is then argued that due to the ongoing desire to improve the way in which scientific evidence is managed by the legal system, epistemic enhancement is not merely desirable but perhaps morally necessary. Although this may seem to sustain tensions between individual and common interests, I argue that in reality it reveals a deep constitutive harmony between the individual good and the common good, one that is both significant in its own right and one that should be exploited by proponents of enhancement. (shrink)

SummaryEarly geological investigations in the St David's area (Pembrokeshire) are described, particularly the work of Murchison. In a reconnaissance survey in 1835, he regarded a ridge of rocks at St David's as intrusive in unfossiliferous Cambrian; and the early Survey mapping (chiefly the work of Aveline and Ramsay) was conducted on that assumption, leading to the publication of maps in 1845 and 1857. The latter represented the margins of the St David's ridge as ‘Altered Cambrian’. So the supposedly intrusive ‘syenite’ (...) was regarded as younger, and there was no Precambrian. These views were challenged by a local doctor, Henry Hicks, who developed an idea of the ex-Survey palaeontologist John Salter that the rocks of the ridge were stratified and had formed a Precambrian island, round which Cambrian sediments (now confirmed by fossil discoveries) had been deposited. Hicks subsequently proposed subdivision of his Precambrian into ‘Dimetian’, ‘Pebidian’, and (later) ‘Arvonian’, and he attempted correlations with rocks in Shropshire, North Wales, and even North America, seeking to develop the neo-Neptunist ideas of Sterry Hunt. The challenge to the Survey's work was countered in the 1880s by the Director General, Geikie, who showed that Hicks's idea of stratification in the Dimetian was mistaken. A heated controversy developed, several amateur geologists, supported by a group of Cambridge Sedgwickians, forming a coalition of ‘Archaeans’ against the Survey. Geikie was supported by Lloyd Morgan. Attention focused particularly on Ogof Lle-sugn Cave and St Non's Arch, with theory/controversy-ladenness of observations evident on both sides. Evidence from an eyewitness student record of a Geological Society meeting reveals the ‘sanit`ized’ nature of the official summary of the debate in QJGS. Field mapping early in the twentieth century by J. F. N. Green allowed a compromise consensus to be achieved, but Green's evidence for unconformity between the Cambrian and the Dimetian, obtained by excavation, can no longer be verified, and his consensual history of the area may need revision. Unconformity between the Cambrian and the Pebidian tuffs is not in doubt, however, and Precambrian at St David's is accepted. The study exhibits features of geological controversy and the British geological community in the nineteenth century. It also furnishes a further instance of the great influence of Murchison in nineteenth-century British geology and the side-effects of his controversy with Sedgwick. (shrink)

Butterfield claims that "there is little verifiable information on the new economic zones -- no full-time American correspondents have been admitted since the war -- but they are evidently not popular." While it is true that American correspondents are not welcomed in Vietnam, there is nonetheless ample expert eyewitness testimony, including that of journalists of international repute, visiting Vietnamese professors from Canada, American missionaries and others who have traveled through the country where they worked for many years. Jean and (...) Simonne Lacouture published a book in 1976 on a recent visit, critical of much of what they saw but giving a generally very positive account of reconstruction efforts and popular committment. Max Ediger of the Mennonite Central Committee, who worked in Vietnam for many years and stayed for thirteen months after the war, testified before Congress in March 1977 on a two-week return visit in January, also conveying a very favorable impression of the great progress he observed despite the "vast destruction of soil and facilities inflicted by the past war." There have also been positive accounts of the "new economic zones" in such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Canadian Pacific Affairs. (shrink)

This article investigates African women commuter trading activities in Nairobi in the first decade after World War One. Its findings derive mainly from a research project carried out in 1989-1996. The major source of data for the study was oral interviews with the women who traded in Nairobi during the years under study, as well as with eyewitnesses to their trading activities. Sampling of such respondents employed the purposive technique because of its ability to deal with the problem of an (...) incomplete population frame by conveniently drawing the required study sample from available resources. The research drew other data from library and archival sources, especially to corroborate the oral evidence. However, this article utilises additional archival and library data to achieve greater comprehensiveness than was attained in the earlier version. The article therefore makes an important intellectual contribution to the ongoing debate on the social, political and economic role and impact of African women’s economic activities such as commodity trade in African towns. (shrink)

In many judicial systems, confessions are a requirement for criminal conviction. Even if confessions are intrinsically convincing, this might not entirely explain why they play such a paramount role. In addition, it has been suggested that confessions owe their importance to their legitimizing role, explaining why they could be required even when other evidence has convinced a judge. But why would confessions be particularly suited to justify verdicts? One possibility is that they can be more easily transmitted from one (...) individual to the next, and thus spread in the population without losing their convincingness. 360 English-speaking participants were asked to evaluate the convincingness of one of three justifications for a verdict, grounded either in a confession, eyewitnesses, or circumstantial evidence, and to pass on that justification to another participant, who performed the same task. Then, 240 English-speaking participants evaluated the convincingness of some of the justifications produced by the first group of participants. Compared to the other justifications, justifications based on confessions lost less of their convincingness in the transmission process. Modeling pointed to the most common forms the justifications would take as they are transmitted, and results showed that the most common variant of the justification based on a confession was more convincing. (shrink)

It is Austin's view that there is no single answer to the question of what we are doing when we are perceiving. In some cases of perceiving, such as hearing, Austin thinks that it is legitimate to speak of ourselves as making inferences based on evidence and, therefore, as possibly making mistakes. In other cases of perceiving, however, such ways of speaking would be illegitimate. When we can be said to see something right in front of our noses, it (...) is meaningless to ask for our evidence, or to speak of ourselves as making inferences, or to think that we might be making mistakes. As Austin puts it, "But how absurd it is, really, to suggest that I am giving a verdict when I say what is going on under my nose!" To speak in such a manner would be, according to this view, to admit that "there is no such thing as being an eyewitness of what goes on in the 'material world'....". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections by Matthew LeveringBrant PitreDid Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections by Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 272 pp.In his book Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections, Matthew Levering writes "to make the case" that there is "good reason" to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (1). In this (...) self-described work of "theological apologetics" (211), Levering argues from a threefold foundation for the credibility of Jesus's resurrection: (1) "the New Testament evidence," considered from the perspective of historical investigation; (2) the "sheer strangeness" of the apostolic claim that [End Page 1347] Jesus was "resurrected" and not just resuscitated or exalted into heaven as an immortal soul; (3) and the intrinsic credibility of the "supreme love" revealed through his death and resurrection (2–4). As this threefold foundation makes clear, Levering draws together both "historical and theological reasons for believing that Jesus' Resurrection happened" (4).In chapter 1, Levering contends that, while "faith does not stand or fall upon the results of historical research, those who insist that the truth of Jesus' Resurrection has nothing to do with the domain of historical investigation are mistaken" (30). To this end, he offers a survey of three figures: (1) the Belgian Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx; (2) the American Protestant biblical scholar Dale C. Allison Jr.; and (3) the Anglican bishop and biblical theologian N. T. Wright. Levering exposes the serious flaws of contemporary attempts to reduce the resurrection claims of early Christians to hallucinations or visions of someone who has recently died. In particular, Levering finds compelling Wright's argument that the bodily resurrection of Jesus provides "the best historical explanation" of the early Christian claim that what first-century Jews expected to happen to everyone at the end of time had in fact happened to only one person—Jesus of Nazareth—in the middle of time. From a strictly historical point of view, claims that the disciples were merely moved by grace to a new experience Jesus being "alive" or that they simply experienced hallucinatory visions of Jesus after his death fail to explain the "radical change of eschatology" that took place in the early Church (56).In chapter 2, Levering explores the question of whether "the Church's mediation is truly effective in enabling us to share in the apostolic communion with the risen Jesus" (63). He first offers a sympathetic overview of the Protestant biblical scholar Richard Bauckham's book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2003; 2nd ed., 2017), in which he claims that the Gospels rest largely on "eyewitness testimony" (87–88). According to Levering, Bauckham's historical arguments show that "the ongoing presence of eyewitnesses provides a reason for not being skeptical about the major events of Jesus' life as reported by the Gospels, including his Resurrection" (89). At the same time, Levering insists that eyewitness memory is only one "mode of historical remembrance" utilized by the Church; in addition, Jesus also "willed that the historical remembrance of his Resurrection be an ecclesial reality" (90)—that is, a liturgical act of "remembrance" that takes place above all in the Eucharistic liturgy.In chapter 3, Levering aims to shed light on "the role of the Old Testament in aiding the discernment of the historical credibility of Jesus's Resurrection" (91). This chapter presents a stark contrast to contemporary [End Page 1348] studies of the resurrection that begin (and end) with the New Testament data. In it, Levering surveys the work of three contemporary scholars—Dale Allison, N. T. Wright, and the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson—and puts them in conversation with Thomas Aquinas's thirteenth-century commentary on the account of Jesus's resurrection in John 20–21. As this chapter amply demonstrates, it is "precisely in the scriptural history that the Creator God has guided, that we come to know that given such a God and such a history, Jesus' Resurrection is believable" (112). According to Levering, "the entire Old Testament" (113) is a necessary prolegomenon for understanding what it even means to say that Jesus has been raised in the first... (shrink)

No doubt this breezily written and informative volume will fill a gaping lacuna in most JSE readers' knowledge of evidence for psychokinesis generally and poltergeist phenomena in particular. It certainly did for me. Healy and Cropper survey 52 different Australian cases, spanning the years 1845-2002. The first eleven chapters cover the authors' 11 strongest cases in considerable detail. Chapter 12 describes the remaining 41 cases more briefly, and catalogues all 52 cases in chronological order. Chapter 13 purports to wrap (...) things up, but it's followed by three appendices introducing additional cases outside Australia and brief discussions of similar or at least potentially relevant physical mysteries-for example, some Asian fire poltergeist cases, ball lightning, UFOs, and reported rains of fishes. The authors rate their cases on a five-star scale, which they apply judiciously. Ratings begin at zero for apparent or proven hoaxes, and then range from half a star ("for questionable or very poorly documented cases" [p. 7]) to five stars. Healy and Cropper write: "With only two exceptions, we have reserved the four and five-star rating for very well documented cases where we were able to interview the eyewitnesses or in which we had some other personal involvement" (p. 7). The case they consider the strongest-the Mayanup case from 1955-2002-is the only one to earn five stars. Humpty Doo (1998)-possibly the most famous, or notorious-gets four and a half. Several cases earned between three and four stars, and quite a few get either zero stars or half a star. The two highest-rated cases are genuinely interesting. In the Humpty Doo case, many credible observers witnessed the phenomena under conditions which quite clearly seemed to rule out chicanery, and which conformed to poltergeist reports in other parts of the world. The phenomena included "showers of stones both indoors and out, dangerous objects thrown with great force but without causing injury, objects falling unnaturally slowly yet producing unnaturally loud sounds on impact, objects observed levitating, objects observed materializing in mid-air" (p. 48), the intense heat of apported objects, and more. (shrink)

This self-published volume is a valuable and natural successor to Grosso’s earlier The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation, which I reviewed very favorably in JSE 30-2 (2016): 275-278. In the earlier work, Grosso presented the amazing essentials of the career of the Flying Friar, including some detailed descriptions from eyewitnesses extracted from contemporary sources (including Bernini). In this book, Grosso performs the additional valuable service of providing an abridged translation of the most (...) important contemporary biography of Joseph, a book brimming with compelling detailed eyewitness accounts, many taken verbatim during Joseph’s protracted inquisition. Details always matter, but perhaps more so in a case so remote from the present day and so extraordinary with respect to the magnitude of the reported phenomena. I remind the reader that the case of St. Joseph provides the earliest outstanding evidence for human levitation and quite possibly the best from any era. The levitations were observed by thousands of people, often near at hand, in flight (not simply at his destination) and in daylight. Moreover, the reports often converge on fascinating and unexpected striking details—e.g., that Joseph’s clothes would not move during his flights, or that he would not extinguish candles as he flew among them. Moreover, Joseph reportedly caused many dramatic healings (again, richly detailed in Bernini’s Vita), and his apparent feats of ESP and bilocation are likewise astounding and difficult to dismiss. So this volume takes us more deeply into the life and character of Joseph and regales us with a great deal more material about the phenomena themselves. In my view, this book is indispensable for students of macro-PK and spontaneous psi generally, and (needless to say) especially so for those who can’t read Bernini in Italian. (shrink)

Empathy is important in our digitized and polarized world and an important aspect of education. What contribution can history teachers make to develop this in their students? In this study we investigated whether a lesson unit making use of eyewitnesses and designed from six pedagogical principles, resulted in more confidence in the ability to empathize, attributed importance to empathy and understanding of empathy by 10th grade students. In addition, we investigated the differences between two conditions: the use of a guest (...) speaker versus eyewitnesses in a documentary. In this quasi-experimental intervention study, we used a pretest-posttest-follow-up design. The data were collected via questionnaires containing closed and open questions. The results showed that students (N = 97) in both conditions gained confidence in their ability to empathize and improved their ability to explain what empathy means and why it is important. After two months, progress on these items was still significant. In the condition with the guest speaker students scored significantly higher on understanding empathy than students who participated in the lesson unit with the documentary. This study contributes to the understanding of developing empathy through the use of eyewitnesses in history classes and the measurement of students’ understanding of empathy. (shrink)

Fallibilists claim that one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Jessica Brown offers a compelling defence of this view against infallibilists, who claim that it is contradictory to claim to know and yet to admit the possibility of error.

Delusions are deeply evidence-resistant. Patients with delusions are unmoved by evidence that is in direct conflict with the delusion, often responding to such evidence by offering obvious, and strange, confabulations. As a consequence, the standard view is that delusions are not evidence-responsive. This claim has been used as a key argumentative wedge in debates on the nature of delusions. Some have taken delusions to be beliefs and argued that this implies that belief is not constitutively (...) class='Hi'>evidence-responsive. Others hold fixed the evidenceresponsiveness of belief and take this to show that delusions cannot be beliefs. Against this common assumption, I appeal to a large range of empirical evidence to argue that delusions are evidence-responsive in the sense that subjects have the capacity to respond to evidence on their delusion in rationally permissible ways. The extreme evidence-resistance of delusions is a consequence of powerful masking factors on these capacities, such as strange perceptual experiences, motivational factors, and cognitive biases. This view makes room for holding both that belief is constitutively evidence-responsive and that delusions are beliefs, and it has important implications for the study and treatment of delusions. (shrink)