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Two Approaches to Reasoning with Evidence: Arguments and Stories

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Arguments, Stories and Criminal Evidence

Part of the book series: Law and Philosophy Library ((LAPS,volume 92))

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Abstract

The two types of reasoning that represent the main trends in the research on reasoning with criminal evidence. The first is argumentative reasoning, where the parties argue for and against the facts-at-issue using arguments based on evidence. The second type of reasoning is story-based or narrative reasoning, where the parties each provide alternative stories that explain the evidence. The advantages and disadvantages of each of the types of reasoning and the similarities and differences between them are also discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The case as presented here is a simplified account and deviates from Wagenaar and colleagues’ account on some points.

  2. 2.

    In Chapter 5, the idea of a set of arguments “defending” itself against attackers is made more clear through a series of formal definitions.

  3. 3.

    In Chapter 5, a formal dialogue game for a hybrid argumentative story-based theory will be provided.

  4. 4.

    This argument game is essentially an adapted version of (Prakken, 1997) .

  5. 5.

    Sherlock Holmes used these signs to explain that Watson was an army doctor (In Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet).

  6. 6.

    In order to have a similar-looking scheme as the one for expert opinion given above, the abductive practical scheme presented here is of a slightly different form than the one in (Bex et al., 2009) .

  7. 7.

    In the Umilian chart (Wigmore, 1931, p. 56, see Fig. 7.4 in this book), node 9 is effectively a cause for node 8: J falsely charging U with bigamy caused a murderous emotion (in U) towards J. However, the scenario is here not properly separated from the argument and this combination of evidential and causal reasoning should be treated with care (cf. Pearl, 1988a).

  8. 8.

    In the remained of this chapter Pennington and Hastie will often be referred to without explicitly mentioning one of these articles.

  9. 9.

    Another well-known fallacy is cum hoc ergo propter hoc or correlation does not imply causation.

  10. 10.

    Twining (1999) calls these schemes “story types” or “scenarios”.

  11. 11.

    In this sense, a particular story can be likened to a case-specific generalization.

  12. 12.

    Just as a story can correspond to an abstract story scheme, a story can also correspond to a more abstract (but still case-specific) or more specific version of itself. For example, the event “Haaknat robs the supermarket” can be specified as “Haaknat threatens to use force against the owner of the supermarket” and “the owner of the supermarket hands over the money to Haaknat”.

  13. 13.

    Exactly what constitutes a proper or a good story will be discussed in Section 3.2.4.

  14. 14.

    Twining (1999) , however, argues that stories are not always necessary. In many criminal cases there is only one fact at issue and complex hypotheses involving motives and actions need not be considered.

  15. 15.

    In this sense, stories play a big psychological role (Anderson et al., 2005) , as opposed to the more atomistic arguments, which play a more logical role.

  16. 16.

    Wigmore argued that the (argumentative) chart method is the only “thorough and scientific method” for analysing evidence.

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  1. University of Dundee, School of Computing, DD1 4HN, Dundee, UK

    Floris J. Bex

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Bex, F.J. (2011). Two Approaches to Reasoning with Evidence: Arguments and Stories. In: Arguments, Stories and Criminal Evidence. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0140-3_3

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