On Generalizations I: a Preliminary Exploration
Terence Anderson · University of Miami School of Law Institutional Repository (University of Miami) · 1999
This essay is a part of a larger work in progress.The year that I spent as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (1994/95) afforded me the time to begin my work on generalizations in legal and non-legal contexts.The ideas developed here were first presented at the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Symposium on The Science of Proof hosted and sponsored by the South Texas College of Law.I am indebted to those who attended and participated in that symposium.I am specially indebted to William Twining and David Schum, who have provoked and critiqued my thinking about evidential and inferential issues for almost two decades, and to Carolyn Bugh and Erica Beecher-Monas whose detailed critiques of earlier drafts significantly contributed to the final project.I am also indebted to a generation of students who suffered through my course on Analysis of Evidence and have done detailed analyses of complex masses of evidence that have reinforced my view that the kind of analysis suggested here can generate important and useful insights.1.Or, to parallel Descartes' elegant simplicity: All who think are; I think; therefore, I am.