Date of Graduation
12-2011
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in Philosophy (MA)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
Philosophy
Advisor/Mentor
Lyons, Jack
Committee Member
Senor, Thomas D.
Second Committee Member
Adler, Jacob
Third Committee Member
Lyons, Jack
Keywords
Philosophy; religion and theology; Social sciences; Legal epistemology; Legal evidence; Philosophy of law; Reliabilism
Abstract
The domain of legal epistemology is defined from two alternative perspectives: individual epistemology and Social epistemology. Since these perspectives have different objects of evaluation, their judgments privilege and exclude different sets of information. While methodological individualism is concerned with justified beliefs of individual knowers, the Social angle focuses on the institutional conditions of knowledge. I will show that the information that is respectively excluded by both the individual and the Social concepts of legal epistemology weaken their respective evaluations. With this in mind, I will explore one new option of defining legal epistemology. This alternative is more comprehensive, in the sense that integrates the information excluded by the aforementioned concepts. My intuition is that such an alternative is more accurate because it takes into account both legal agents and institutions. Since "the devil is in the details," I will corroborate my thesis with two theories of legal epistemology, namely, Susan Haack's and Alvin Goldman's. The idea is to show that a proper function legal epistemology illuminates better the main epistemological problems of the field of law.
Citation
Marrero, D. (2011). Cognitive Agendas and Legal Epistemology. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/146