Experimental and Cross-Cultural Epistemology

Chapter 10 examines how contemporary trends in experimental philosophy can benefit from the study of Buddhist epistemology. In particular, it explores the question of whether an appreciation of Buddhist epistemology could inform philosophers about both the merits of experimental epistemology and experimental philosophy’s emphasis on probing intuitions about knowledge. The second half of the chapter steps back from this examination of experimental philosophy and argues that there is value to be found in contemporary philosophers learning more about other traditions of epistemological theorizing, including the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions of epistemology. Among other things, it can serve to change the way we view our own tradition of epistemology and lay bare the tacit assumptions that undergird contemporary discussions of knowledge.

Belief States in Criminal Law

Belief-state ascription—determining what someone “knew,” “believed,” was “aware of,” etc.—is central to many areas of law. In criminal law, the distinction between knowledge and recklessness, and the use of broad jury instructions concerning other belief states, presupposes a common and stable understanding of what those belief-state terms mean. But a wealth of empirical work at the intersection of philosophy and psychology—falling under the banner of “Experimental Epistemology”—reveals how laypeople’s understandings of mens rea concepts differ systematically from what scholars, courts, and perhaps legislators, have assumed.As implemented, mens rea concepts are much more context-dependent and normatively evaluative than the conventional wisdom suggests, even assuming that jurors are following jury instructions to the letter. As a result, there is less difference between knowledge and recklessness than is typically assumed; jurors consistently “over”-ascribe knowledge to criminal defendants; and concepts like “belief,” “awareness,” and “conscious disregard” mean different things in different contexts, resulting in mens rea findings systematically responsive to aspects of the case traditionally considered irrelevant to the meaning of those terms.This Article provides the first systematic account of the factors driving jurors’ ascriptions of the specific belief states criminal law invokes. After surveying mens rea jury instructions, introducing the Experimental Epistemology literature to the legal literature on mens rea, and examining the implications of that literature for criminal law, this Article considers ways to begin bridging the surprisingly large gap between mens rea theory and practice.

Experimental epistemology

Experimental epistemology is the branch of experimental philosophy devoted to the empirical study of our shared practices of reasoning and making judgments about knowledge, evidence, and justified belief. In addition to trying to construct an empirically grounded account of folk epistemology, experimental epistemologists also attempt to use the results of their studies to make contributions to ongoing debates within mainstream epistemology. Mainstream contemporary epistemologists generally take themselves to be providing an account of epistemic concepts that are shared by all rational agents. Although the most fundamental questions in epistemology may not be empirical ones, it is an empirical question whether all rational agents employ the same epistemic concepts or reason about them in the same way. If it were discovered that individuals from different cultures made widely varying epistemic judgments about the same cases or that philosophers’ thinking about knowledge diverged significantly from that of ordinary individuals, this would have a major impact on how epistemologists approached their subject. It is on empirical questions such as these that experimental epistemology focuses its attention.

Epistemics for Forensics

ABSTRACTForensic science error rates are needlessly high. Applying the perspective of veritistic social epistemology to forensic science could produce new institutional designs that would lower forensic error rates. We make such an application through experiments in the laboratory with human subjects. Redundancy is the key to error prevention, discovery, and elimination. In the “monopoly epistemics” characterizing forensics today, one privileged actor is asked to identify the truth. In “democratic epistemics,” several independent parties are asked. In an experiment contrasting them, democratic epistemics reduced the rate at which biased observers obscured the truth by two-thirds. These results highlight, first, the potential of “epistemic systems design,” which employs the techniques of economic systems design to address issues of veracity rather than efficiency, and second, the value of “experimental epistemology,” which employs experimental techniques in the study of science.