1 . The Importance of Testimony We citizens of the 2lSt century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others-of which we often know almost nothing-in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been...

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...

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...

I am Arti Rai, a law professor at Duke Law School and a faculty associate of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. For the last 10 years, I have conducted research on the interaction of federally funded research and the patent system. Currently, I am funded by the National Institutes of Health to examine intellectual property rights issues that arise in collaborative inter-universi...

That sort of capacity which involves not the organic powers, moral and mental, requisite for all testimony, nor yet the emotional power of unbiased observation and statement, but the skill to acquire accurate conceptions which may be termed experiential capacity. The person possessing it is commonly called an expert. This capacity may be obtained by special training or experience, or by both. I...

My name is Sidney Winter. I am the Deloitte and Touche Professor of Management, Emeritus, at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where I spent 15 years in the Management Department. I am trained as an economist, and I previously was a tenured faculty member in two economics departments, those of Yale University (13 years) and the University of Michigan (8). One of my central r...

In an article in the journal Science, Faust and Ziskin have asserted that the testimony of psychologists and psychiatrists cannot "meet legal standards for expertise" for purposes of trial evidence. ' This assertion, given visibility and credence by a journal of the stature of Science, understandably has raised concern among forensic mental health profess i o n a l ~ . ~ Attorneys have begun to...