Profiles of judicial epistemology

There is an increasing awareness of the need to study the methods used and the validity of the knowledge obtained in court in both the Italian and international fields, but this need can only be satisfied by combining the traditional technical-legal approach with a focus on contemporary philosophical and scientific debate. This is the inspiration behind the volume, which in the first place highlights how judicial truth is functional to the goal of justice. Since the vehicle of knowledge of events is their narration, the trial is the typical place for verbalizing the experience, where the semantic conception of truth is recognized as that most suitable for maintaining the epistemological neutrality of the trial in its reconstruction of the issue in dispute, the achievement of which is the basis for the adoption of a just decision. In this respect an illustration is provided of the processes of knowledge which form the basis for any judicial activity (civil, criminal or administrative) and of the dialectical concept of evidence, for which the guarantee of adversary system (audiatur et altera pars) principle is essential. Consequently, a methodological character must be found even in the distinction between quaestio facti and quaestio iuris, a judgment of fact and a judgment of law: it is implemented within a unitary context, from which a different proportion can only emerge between the attitudes, which are nonetheless present, of observation and legal assessment. Having thus defined the various meanings of the word “evidence” from an epistemological perspective, its structure is then examined and, in order to understand this, it is necessary to analyze the notion and judicial use of common sense generalizations and both logical and scientific laws; following this in-depth study it is possible to differentiate evidence in the strict sense and circumstantial evidence. This then provides us with the conceptual elements for studying the evidentiary phenomenon in its dynamic perspective, that is to say, a process aimed at acquiring non-prohibited, pertinent and relevant instruments on which the judge may base his decision-making: in order to achieve this, he must observe the rules that are identified and examined in the final part of the volume.