![]() ![]() To this end, I connect my account to its main competitor, the Bayesian accounts of eyewitness reliability (Sect. Furthermore, I argue that, and explore under which conditions, this approach is rational. In particular, I develop a prescriptive account that offers guidance to eyewitness evaluators. In this article I show that explanation-based reasoning is also a rational and useful approach to assessing eyewitness reliability. However, existing work on TIBE in the philosophy of testimony has mostly been limited to brief, descriptive accounts, intended to capture our intuitions about when we may trust the utterances of others in daily life. I am not the first to argue that we can use inference to the best explanation to assess eyewitness testimony. However, as some have suggested – and as I show in this article – explanatory reasoning is similarly a plausible, useful way of thinking about the reliability of the available evidence, such as eyewitness testimony. So far, these approaches have focused mainly on the decision whether the proof standard has been met – for instance whether guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal case. The main benefit of such approaches compared to competing accounts is that they fit with how people reason naturally and that they offer direction to decision-makers as to how to go about assessing the available evidence (Pennington & Hastie, 1993 Allen & Pardo, 2019 Nance, 2016, 84). These approaches conceptualize legal proof as a competition between potential explanations of the available evidence – usually in the form of narratives told by the parties at trial. 2 for further exposition).Įxplanation-based approaches are increasingly popular in evidence scholarship (e.g., Amaya 2015 Allen & Pardo, 2019 Jellema, 2021). ![]() On TIBE, we compare competing explanations of why the particular statement was offered (see Sect. How should they go about doing so? I argue that Testimonial Inference to the Best Explanation (TIBE) is a useful but underdeveloped account of eyewitness evaluation. ![]() In such cases evaluators will have to look at whether the statement comes from a reliable source. However, the veracity of such a story cannot always be verified or falsified directly. This sometimes means checking whether the witness’s story fits with other established facts of the case. In criminal cases, decision-makers therefore regularly face the difficult but crucial task of evaluating eyewitness testimony. It is also notoriously unreliable and a major source of judicial errors (Cardozo, 2009). Eyewitness testimony is one of the most important kinds of criminal evidence. ![]()
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