Abduction, IBE and standards of proof
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1365712718813794 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Abduction, IBE and standards
of proof
Giovanni Tuzet
Bocconi University, Milano, Italy
Abstract
First, the article addresses the claims that Allen and Pardo make on the abductive nature of
fact-finding in the framework of relative plausibility, and it considers also whether abduction
and inference to the best explanation (IBE) can be taken as the same. Second, the article
addresses the critique that IBE/relative plausibility is too weak to comply with the criminal
standard of proof. On these issues the article argues that it is inappropriate to equate
abduction and IBE (the former is just a component of the latter), which also means that the
relative plausibility account is better construed as an IBE claim rather than as abduction; and it
argues that the relative plausibility account survives the critique based on the criminal standard
of proof, because, simply put, fact-finders need to consider whether the best explanation of the
evidence meets the relevant standard of proof.
Keywords
abduction, fact-finding, IBE, standards of proof
The Scylla and Charybdis of fact-finding
If you assume that in civil or criminal cases fact-finders operate deductively, you are clearly
on the wrong track. They do not do that, since they almost always deal with incomplete infor-
mation, uncertainty, factual ambiguity and the like (see e.g. Allen, 1994, Redmayne, 1999). If
you assume that they just operate intuitively (as the old ‘hunch’ theory contended), you are again
on a wrong track, because there are patterns of reasoning and contextual constraints that govern
their findings.
The deduction-nostalgic might want to move up to the normative level, and claim that it would be
good to operate deductively, namely to base findings on deductions from the evidence at disposal; fact-
finders should do it – so the normative claim would go. Unfortunately, this is also a non-starter: if ‘ought’
implies ‘can’, it is inappropriate to normatively expect from the fact-finders something they cannot do.
Given incomplete information, uncertainty, factual ambiguity and the like, it is impossible to draw
Corresponding author:
Giovanni Tuzet, Bocconi University, Milano, 20136, Italy.
E-mail: giovanni.tuzet@unibocconi.it
The International Journalof
Evidence & Proof
2019, Vol. 23(1-2) 114–120
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1365712718813794
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