Among contemporary epistemologists of testimony, David Hume is standardly regarded as a ‘global reductionist’, where global reductionism requires the hearer to have sufficient first-hand knowledge of the facts in order to individually ascertain the reliability of the testimony in question. In the present paper, I argue that, by construing Hume’s reductionism in too individualistic a fashion, th...

The U.S. Supreme Court case of Daubert v. MerrellDow Pharmaceuticals focused attention on the problem of “junk science” testimony in the courtroom, a decision that led to the emergence of the Daubert hearing as a pre-trial screening device for determining the reliability and relevance of expert testimony. Similar to other useful legal procedural safeguards of due process, alas, the Daubert hear...

The present study investigated whether people used the gender of an expert witness as a heuristic cue to evaluate the evidence presented by the expert. Specifically, the gender of the expert and the complexity of the expert’s testimony (low, high) were varied systematically within a simulated civil trial involving an antitrust price-fixing agreement, It was expected that the male expert would b...

Doubtless the Braiidon bill, introduced in the last Missouri legislature, and quoted from in the letter from its author which was published in the last issue of the VISITOR, has attracted considerable attention from readers. Its two notable features appear to be the sworn list of taxable property and the provision relative to stamping notes and bonds. The first named feature differs but little ...

Good morning, Madam Chairwoman, and members of the Subcommittee. My name is Tracy Collier, I am the Director of the Environmental Conservation Division, in the Northwest Fisheries Science Center of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce. Research conducted within my Division focuses on the effe...