The right which lawyers possess of studying these questions, so far as
they lie in our field, is of modern establishment. According to
Hillebrand[126] the theory of knowledge has to-day broken up into
individual theories, involving the certain needs of special fields of
knowledge. The place of the epistomologists, who are professionals and
beyond the pale of individual disciplines, is now taken by the
representatives of those disciplines and each works expressly on his own
epistomological problem. Our especial problem is the drawing of
inferences from the material presented to us or brought together by our
efforts, just as in other disciplines. If we set ourselves the task of
determining the procedure when subjecting the fundamental principles of
our work to revision and examining their utility, we merely ask whether
the process is voluntary or according to fixed laws; and having cleared
up that point we ask what influence psychological conditions exercise on
the situation. It is, indeed, said that thinking is a congenital
endowment, not to be learned from rules. But the problem is not teaching
the inferrer to think; the problem is the examination of how inferences
have been made by another and what value his inferences may have for our
own conclusions. And our own time, which has been bold enough to lay
this final conclusion in even the most important criminal cases, in the
hands of laymen, this time is doubly bound at least to prepare all
possible control for this work, to measure what is finally taken as
evidence with the finest instruments possible, and to present to the
jury only what has been proved and repeatedly examined.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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