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Witness Testimony Evidence

Witness Testimony Evidence

Witness Testimony Evidence

Argumentation and the Law
Douglas Walton, University of Windsor, Ontario
January 2008
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Adobe eBook Reader
9780511364143

    Recent work in artificial intelligence has increasingly turned to argumentation as a rich, interdisciplinary area of research that can provide new methods related to evidence and reasoning in the area of law. Douglas Walton provides an introduction to basic concepts, tools and methods in argumentation theory and artificial intelligence as applied to the analysis and evaluation of witness testimony. He shows how witness testimony is by its nature inherently fallible and sometimes subject to disastrous failures. At the same time such testimony can provide evidence that is not only necessary but inherently reasonable for logically guiding legal experts to accept or reject a claim. Walton shows how to overcome the traditional disdain for witness testimony as a type of evidence shown by logical positivists, and the views of trial sceptics who doubt that trial rules deal with witness testimony in a way that yields a rational decision-making process.

    • Introduces new methods for visual representation of witness testimony evidence
    • Useful for the many fields that have an interest in evidence in law and related disciplines
    • Important reading for graduate students of law, philosophy, logic and artificial intelligence

    Product details

    January 2008
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9780511364143
    0 pages
    0kg
    12 tables
    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • 1. Witness testimony as argumentation
    • 2. Plausible reasoning in legal argumentation
    • 3. Scripts, stories, and anchored narratives
    • 4. Computational dialectics
    • 5. Witness examination as peirastic dialogue
    • 6. A dialectical model of the fair trial
    • 7. Supporting and attacking witness testimony.
      Author
    • Douglas Walton , University of Windsor, Ontario

      Douglas Walton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Winnipeg. An internationally recognised scholar of argumentation theory and logic, he is the author of many books, most recently Argumentation Methods for Artificial Intelligence in Law and Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation. Dr. Walton's research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Isaak Walton Killum Memorial Foundation.