Peter, all --
Peter Tillers wrote:
Nonetheless, there is not a complete or radical separation between the kind of legal argument that one sees in the courtroom and the kind of "argument" that a scientist engages in when she attempts, say, to determine the cause or causes of some disease. Logic or something akin to logic does play a role even in the arguments that trial lawyers have with other the judge in the courtroom.
Surely a fundamental difference between scientific argument and legal argument is that the former concerns argument over beliefs, about what is true of the world, while the latter is argument over actions, about what to do in some situation. Any rational consideration about what to do should take into account the consequences of different alternative actions, and how these consequences are valued relatively to one another by the decision-maker(s). Science, on the other hand (or, at least our current western mythology of science) expressly ignores the consequence of beliefs when choosing between alternative beliefs: science, famously, has no place for the scientist's opinions as to what he or she would like to be true.
According to Feyerabend, this was the crux of the difference between Galileo and the RC Church, Galileo pursuing beliefs regardless of their wider consequences, with the Church considering the social and political consequences of alternative cosmologies to the then official one. The Church was behaving rationally, given its position as an actor in the world, in suppressing Galileo's new ideas.
I fully understand that much courtroom argument begins with, or is centred on arguments over beliefs, prior to argument over actions. But attempting to construct a single theory of logic or argument which applies both to beliefs and to actions seems to me not only impossible, but also undesirable.
-- Peter McBurney University of Liverpool, UK -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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