posted 02-16-2008 02:23 PM            

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Ah Ray, now that would require a conversation about a confounding variable: the fall of man in what once was a completely orderly universe.... So yes, if we bored everybody with this discussion, I suspect we'd agree in the end.

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Tempting. OK, I'll bite (a little bit). Let's start with a basic question involving biology.

Where do apples come from?

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This would seem to preclude the means of proving truth (again, we could argue a high probability, I know) in our courtrooms everyday: the historical method. If the truth is in fact that A shot B and at the time said "I don't like the look on your face," in a scenario in which we have no forensic evidence we can test empirically (which still couldn't explain the whole story anyhow) and 10 of us saw the whole incident, would our testimony of the facts not then be the truth?

We can't do scientific tests on our memory of the event, nor can we do anything scientific to bring back the words spoken (motive). The truth is still that A killed B because A didn't like the look on B's face.

We can do scientific tests to learn how much confidence we might want to put into one's recollection, I know. We would use that info to determine how much weight to give the testimony of those involved. None of our theatrics ever changes the truth though.

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Testimony is not fact until the court decides it is.

Its important to not mixed up "truth" as a mystical concept, from "truth" as a philosophical construct (problem). Philosophers and scientists have been working on this one for at least 2,300 years of recorded discourse (time of Socrates), a actually long before that.

Testimony about witnessed events will not pass some philosophical tests of truth (i.e., correspondence theory of truth) Neither will beliefs.

Farwell says we can do scientific tests on our memory. Also, to the extent that polygraph reactions are about conditioned response to involvement in (witnessing?) a stimulus event, they might be, in part about memory.

Statements of testimony or belief can pass some philosophical tests of truth, such as "pragmatic truth," which we define as the absence of an intent to deceive. Unfortunately, this theory is rather weak and loose, and does not often provide completely sufficient grounds for legal finds of fact. We like physical evidence.

What stat is referring to is related to post-moderism/deconstructionism/constructivism, and yes, those philosophical paradigms underly a lot of modern psychology, and create the mimetic space in which modern forms of therapy seem to work more effectively than some older forms of psychotherapy (like that of Freud), which were based tenuously on the rational/modern philosophical framework of the industrial era. Rationalism tells us that things are what they are. The problem, for people who want change, is that paradigm doesn't account for changing what one "is" (in the Bill Clinton sense of the word). Postmodernism is not so much concern with what "is" as with our human "experience," and so the importance of a desconstructionist attitude towards our mimetic templates.

Heady stuff, 'specially for us right-and-wrong types.

Its much easier to just hook someone up to the polygraph instrument and get to the truth.

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I suppose in the end, we'd just end up agreeing, but its still fun to think about.

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Aside:

You should have seen the look on my client's face yesterday when acted like I had no idea what he was talking about when he said he expected to see a polygraph machine with pens and stuff. I told him I had never seen one on of them olde-time things. So he 'splained it all to me. He said it was kind of like a seismograph, with pens, and ink and paper stuff.

It kind of made sense, but I had to ask him why we would fool around with that old stuff when we can have computers do everything much easier.

Baffling.

(mark handler keeps warning me not to tease small animals).

r

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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room."
--(Stanley Kubrick/Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove, 1964)