TILLERS ON EVIDENCE
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Professor Peter Tillers of Cardozo Law School in New York blogs for JURIST on the latest evidence issues...
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Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Precision and Imprecision: Uncertainty, Probability & Proof

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (trans. W.D. Ross, revised J. Urmson; Princeton U. Press, 1984) 1094b lines 24-27:

[I]t is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.
Notes:

1. The quoted language may be a bit jarring [in postmodernist jargon: "orthogonal"; in German: "quer"] to participants in contemporary debates about the relationship between probability and (forensic) proof. But, of course, Aristotle's world is different from ours and "probability" in the quoted statement (above) does not mean what it means today.

2. Despite Aristotle's insistence that in certain realms rough or imprecise reasoning is the best that we can do, can we agree that Aristotle was trying to describe precisely how rough reasoning about certain matters works? [Can we speak precisely about imprecise reasoning?]

3. Are Zadeh and Pawlak modern-day Aristotelians?

Posted by Peter Tillers at 8:09 PM
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Professor Peter Tillers

"I have practiced a little bit of law -- I worked as a litigator, once in California and once in Texas -- but for most of my professional life I have studied and taught law.

In the early part of my academic career I dabbled in philosophy, particularly the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. But as I matured, I came to my senses. This explains why during the last 15 years I have devoted much more attention to evidence, inference, and proof in litigation than to German Idealism and similar matters. However, I did not succeed in completely obliterating the influence of philosophy and epistemology on my thinking. Thus, in my effort to understand and explain the process of proof in litigation, I have devoted a great deal of attention to matters such as probability theory and theories of evidence, inference, induction, and proof.


Peter Tillers is Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University. He revised volumes 1 &1A of Wigmore on Evidence (1983) and is the author of Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence (1988; with E. Green).