Abstract
The new, hybrid theory of reasoning about criminal evidence. In the hybrid theory, stories and arguments are combined: each of the parties proposes some story about what (might have) happened in the case and supports with arguments from evidence to some element of the story. The parties can also use arguments to critique each other’s story; for example, they can argue that the other party’s story is incoherent or that there is evidence that contradicts it. The chapter ends by laying down some criteria for judging a party’s position in a case.
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This support is similar to what Pennington and Hastie call evidential coverage (cf. Section 3.2.3 on explaining the evidence). The difference is that in the story-based approach, the story explains (i.e. covers) the evidential data itself whereas in the hybrid approach, the story explains the observations that are supported by evidence.
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Similar to Pennington and Hastie’s requirement that a story is consistent with the evidential data (cf. Section 3.2.3 on evidence in the story based approach).
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On p. 41 it was shown that one way of solving the question which argument should be preferred is to allow for reasoning about the preferences between arguments or rules. In the same way, we could allow for such “meta-level” reasoning about the preferences for different stories (e.g. “my story is better than yours because it is supported by an important witness statement”). However, because of the complexity of the combination of stories and arguments, this direction is here not further pursued.
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Bex, F.J. (2011). A Hybrid Theory of Stories and Arguments. In: Arguments, Stories and Criminal Evidence. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 92. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0140-3_4
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